Assessment: A Refresher and Overview

5. More about "authenticity"

In the previous chapter you learned that authentic assessment is assessment that is meaningful, significant, and worthwhile. Let's explore this a little further.

More practically speaking, we often identify something as authentic when the assessed task matches or is similar to what is done in the workplace or out in "real life".

For example, here are a list of assessment tasks that are generally considered to be authentic:

Work-integrated learning projects (e.g. students create and pitch a marketing plan to a real company who needs one);
Demonstrated competency while on a practicum or preceptorship;
Performances that are assessed by an audience or a panel (e.g. getting something published, winning a grant, presenting at a conference, exhibiting art, selling your work….etc);
Lab reports and field notes submitted for grading;
Building a professional portfolio;
Completing a real task under defined conditions (e.g. writing a lesson plan; editing a report);
Hackathons or maker fairs or problem-based challenges;
Reflecting on experience in some format that aligns with how one might be required to reflect in the workplace or discipline;
Teaching others or leading a workshop.

In contrast, the following things are generally considered to be not very authentic

Closed-book quizzes and exams
Testing isolated skills
Journaling, for the sake of journaling
Essays (unless it's in a creative non-fiction program :-)
End of chapter questions

However, the whole point of education is to prepare people for the workplace (or "real life") by isolating competencies from their original context and breaking them into achievable chunks. Formal education, is by nature, a reductionist approach. As instructors, we take complex, real-world tasks and scaffold the component parts so students can learn them in a way that allows them to practice, fail, and gain capacity and confidence. And often, we find ourselves evaluating student performance and ability on the abstract knowledge and skills that we've isolated rather than the whole competency. This is how authentic can quickly become not-so-authentic! I find it helpful to think of "authentic" as being on a continuum. Context often determines how far up the authenticity continuum your assessment should be.

Regardless of whether your course and assessment focuses more on the isolated skills and memorized content or the actual competency, it's important to be transparent about why that assessment approach has been chosen.

STOP & THINK: Consider the assessment in your course(s). Where does it fall on the authenticity continuum? Can you justify the inclusion of non-authentic tasks to your students? Is there a way to make your assessment more authentic?