Authentic assessment

We understand that assessment drives learning, that is, the methods we use to evaluate students’ knowledge and skills communicates what is important. Authentic assessment enables students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills by engaging in meaningful tasks that mirror real-world situations and problems. Through these tasks, students exercise judgements and innovation to justify and demonstrate solutions. Authentic tasks are also a form of sustainable assessment that allow students to get feedback on their work that can be useful for future practice or integrated into a portfolio of learning for work.

Why?

"While multiple-choice tests can be valid indicators or predictors of academic performance, too often our tests mislead students and teachers about the kinds of work that should be mastered"
(Wiggins, 1990, p.2)

Authentic assessments are often considered an alternative to quizzes or exams, where the emphasis is on memory and knowledge. Through authentic assessment, students are assessed on their creative and problem-solving abilities. Authentic assessments can expand students’ repertoire of knowledge and skills through exploring complex tasks that will better prepare them for contexts beyond the classroom. Further, authentic assessments have been found to better preserve academic integrity than other testing measures.

How?

1. “What do I want students to get out of this task?”

Review the broader landscape of educational requirements and identify practices within professional accreditation or associations, and course learning outcomes, that focus on professional aptitudes, knowledge and skills. Next, identify learning outcomes that promote higher levels of learning such as problem-solving, designing, collaborating, communicating, reasoning or evaluating. Taken together, determine learning objectives for the assessment based on alignment to specific, relevant professional skills and aptitudes, and higher levels of learning.

2. “What could this look like in the real-world?”

Brainstorm possible scenarios where a professional may use their discipline knowledge and skills to demonstrate the learning objective stated in step 1. Use this to guide how students will engage in the assessment. The real-world is complex and ill-defined, so you may find it useful to present the assessment as a form of ‘problem’ that students solve. An example from education:

You have been allocated a classroom where several students have unique learning needs. Outline your approach to supporting students with diverse needs, drawing on relevant resources and aligning this to national policies.

Key elements here are:

• Make it realistic
• Enable students to practice and get feedback on using professional skills
• Empower students to make judgements, creativity and innovation
• Replicate or simulate complex work environments to allow students to experience this within a safe and supportive context.

3. “What are the important criteria students demonstrate here?”

Here you will consider how you will know whether the students performed or produced something well. Think about the criteria for the task in terms of demonstrating higher order knowledge, exercising judgements or innovation, and professional skills. Examples of criteria and descriptions for levels of performance can be found in the TEQSA guide for online authentic assessments (Orrell, 2020).

4. “How does this fit with everything else?”

To ensure the authentic assessment is meaningful, it must be clearly aligned at multiple levels:

• To professional standards
• To course and subject learning outcomes
• To other activities within the subject
• To work and community.

These connections must be well designed (e.g. building smaller assessments for feedback that lead into the summative assessment), articulated (e.g. through subject outlines and course materials) and promoted (e.g. through how the teacher connects the task to the ‘real-world’).

Examples

The following examples are sourced from Indiana University’s Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning (n.d.):

• Nursing – Provide a case study of a patient and ask students to assess and create a plan of care
• Business – Develop a business/marketing/sales plan for an imaginary (or real) company in a student's area of interest.
• Computer Science – Troubleshoot a problematic piece of code. Develop a website/app to solve a particular problem and/or meet a set of criteria
• Psychology – Examine/critique a case study from multiple theoretical positions
• Public Affairs or Service Learning Courses – Consider how a community agency might be impacted by a particular challenge (budget cuts, infrastructure outage, public health crisis, etc.)
• Biology/Chemistry – Draw a diagram of how a process works, indicating what happens if X occurs
• History – Engage in a role play of a particular event in history; describe what might have happened if one element of a historical event had changed.

 

References

Indiana University, Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning (n.d.). Authentic Assessment. https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/authentic-assessment/index.html

Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment, Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, 2(2), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.7275/ffb1-mm19