Six types: structural performance tasks, oral expression, simulated performance tasks, doing experiments or investigations, creating works, and completing research projects.

Performance evaluation was first applied in the fields of psychology and enterprise management, and developed rapidly in the field of educational evaluation after 1990s, becoming one of the popular methods of student evaluation abroad. In recent ten years, educational evaluation and psychometrics experts and subject experts in the field of education in the United States, Britain, Canada and other countries have participated in dozens of performance evaluation research projects, including hands-on experiments of primary school science courses and ongoing large-scale writing and file evaluation. Many states in the United States, such as Maryland, California, Florida, Massachusetts and so on, have adopted this method in the quality evaluation of students' writing ability, mathematics ability and scientific ability among provinces.