Increased-accountability initiatives have lead to an increased reliance on standardized tests to determine whether students are receiving the quality education they need to be successful in society. In response to concerns that these standardized measures are not adequate, proponents argue for the use of more authentic assessments as a means of measuring learning outcomes not easily measured by standardized tests.
Authentic Assessments
One of the first researchers to use the term authentic assessment, Dr. Grant Wiggins, says that authentic assessments directly examine student performance on worthy intellectual tasks, present the student with tasks found in the best instructional activities and real life and determine whether the student can craft polished, thorough and justifiable answers, performances or products.
According to North Central College Professor Jon Mueller, the most common authentic assessment procedures involve the student performing tasks and the teacher using rubrics to establish scores based on how well the final demonstrations match the criterion.
Traditional Standardized Tests
Schools rely on standardized testing procedures because they have only one correct response, such as multiple-choice or true-false questions, and because they are easily administered and scored using objective criteria. ETS, the largest private educational testing and measurement organization in the world, states that standardized tests provide fair, valid and reliable assessments that produce meaningful results and can eliminate bias and prevent unfair advantages by testing the same or similar information under the same testing conditions.
Authentic Assessment Leads to Improved Teaching and Learning
According to Wiggins, while standardized, multiple-choice tests can be valid indicators or predictors of academic performance, tests often mislead students into believing that learning is cramming and mislead teachers into believing tests are after-the-fact, contrived and irrelevant. A move toward more authentic tasks and outcomes improves teaching and learning. Authentic assessment helps students see themselves as active participants, who are working on a task of relevance, rather than passive recipients of obscure facts. It helps teachers by encouraging them to reflect on the relevance of what they teach and provides results that are useful for improving instruction.
Authentic Assessment Views Learning as a Process
According to Mueller, standardized assessments only require test takers to recognize or recall information. Authentic assessments, on the other hand, often ask students to analyze, synthesize and apply what they have learned in a substantial manner, and students create new meaning in the process. Authentic assessments, therefore, offer far more direct evidence of application and construction of knowledge. Authentic assessments focus on the learning process, sound instructional practices and high-level thinking skills and proficiencies needed for success in the real world, and, therefore, may offer students who have been exposed to them huge advantages over those who have not.
Authentic Assessment Criticisms
Criticism of authentic assessments generally involve both the informal development of the assessments and difficulty in ensuring test validity and reliability given the subjective nature of human scoring rubrics as compared to computers scoring multiple-choice test items. Based on the value of authentic assessments to student outcomes, the advantages of authentic assessments outweigh these concerns.
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Writer Bio
Based just outside of Harrisburg, Pa., Catherine Donges teaches adjudicated adolescents in a residential treatment facility in York, Pa. Donges earned both her Master of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Wilkes University and a Master of Science in education from Capella University and has written both a women's fiction and a young adult novel.
Authentic Assessment
When considering how to assess student learning in a course, most instructors would agree that the ideal assessment would be one that not only assesses students’ learning; it also teaches students and improves their skills and understanding of course content. One fundamental aspect of such assessments is that they are authentic.
An authentic assignment is one that requires application of what students have learned to a new situation, and that demands judgment to determine what information and skills are relevant and how they should be used. Authentic assignments often focus on messy, complex real-world situations and their accompanying constraints; they can involve a real-world audience of stakeholders or “clients” as well. According to Grant Wiggins (1998), an assignment is authentic if it
- is realistic.
- requires judgment and innovation.
- asks the student to “do” the subject.
- replicates or simulates the contexts in which adults are “tested” in the workplace or in civic or personal life.
- assesses the student’s ability to efficiently and effectively use a repertoire of knowledge and skills to negotiate a complex task.
- allows appropriate opportunities to rehearse, practice, consult resources, and get feedback on and refine performances and products.
Authentic assessments can be contrasted with conventional test questions, which are often indirect measures of a student’s ability to apply the knowledge and skills gained in a course. Conventional tests have an important place in college courses, but cannot take the place of authentic assessments. The table below, drawn from Wiggins, illustrates the differences between typical tests and authentic assessments.
Typical tests | Authentic tasks | Indicators of authenticity |
Require correct responses | Require a high-quality product or performance, and a justification of the solutions to problems encountered | Correctness is not the only criterion; students must be able to justify their answers. |
Must be unknown to the student in advance to be valid | Should be known in advance to students as much as possible | The tasks and standards for judgment should be known or predictable. |
Are disconnected from real-world contexts and constraints | Are tied to real-world contexts and constraints; require the student to “do” the subject. | The context and constraints of the task are like those encountered by practitioners in the discipline. |
Contain items that isolate particular skills or facts | Are integrated challenges in which a range of skills and knowledge must be used in coordination | The task is multifaceted and complex, even if there is a right answer. |
Include easily scored items | Involve complex tasks that for which there may be no right answer, and that may not be easily scored | The validity of the assessment is not sacrificed in favor of reliable scoring. |
Are “one shot”; students get one chance to show their learning | Are iterative; contain recurring tasks | Students may use particular knowledge or skills in several different ways or contexts. |
Provide a score | Provide usable diagnostic information about students’ skills and knowledge | The assessment is designed to improve future performance, and students are important “consumers” of such information. |
Authentic assessments have several advantages over conventional tests. They are likely to be more valid than conventional tests, particularly for learning outcomes that require higher-order thinking skills. Because they involve real-world tasks, they are also likely to be more interesting for students, and thus more motivating. And finally, they can provide more specific and usable information about what students have succeeded in learning as well as what they have not learned.
However, authentic assessments may require more time and effort on an instructor’s part to develop, and may be more difficult to grade. To address the difficulty of grading authentic assessments, it is often useful to create a grading rubric that specifies the traits that will be evaluated and the criteria by which they will be judged. (For more information, see the CITL resource on rubrics.)
Examples of Authentic Assessments
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 problemmatic 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. |
Who Is Doing This at IUB:
Professor Joshua Danish, in the School of Education, asks his students to apply the cognitive theories they have learned in class to help them interpret children’s behaviors in the classrooms they are observing, in this faculty spotlight.
Professor Alwiya Omar, Clinical Professor of Linguistics and director of IUB’s Swahili Flagship Program, has her students learn Swahili by engaging in an activity with strong roots in African languages and cultures: storytelling. She describes her approach in this faculty spotlight.
References
Wiggins, Grant. (1998). Ensuring authentic performance. Chapter 2 in Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 21 – 42.
For More Help or Information
To get help in designing authentic assessments, contact CITL to meet with a consultant.