Assessment Using Authentic Tasks:

an Example from Static Electricity

We use authentic tasks for our quizzes and tests in grade 9 science. An authentic task is similar to a task that an expert practitioner might carry out in the course of their daily work. A quick way to decide what is not an authentic task is asking this: “do people perform this kind of task outside of schools?” That simple question eliminates tasks in the form of typical multiple choice questions, matching terms, and fill in the blanks. It also eliminates tasks that ask students to provide memorized definitions, answer a stream of short disconnected questions that try to “cover” all the content, or reason through scenarios that scarcely provide a few words of context. Authentic tasks involve elements of thinking used by experts in the service of realistic goals. Outside of school, experts performed their work purposefully; there is always a clear context or situation in which the expert is observing, describing, predicting, building, or explaining.

Realistic Scenarios

After many years of writing tests and quizzes, I realized that many of my attempts to describe a realistic scenario turn out very contrived or incomplete. This is a problem because a realistic context is what cues our students’ scientific understanding. If our teaching goal is having students make sense of their world using science, it's critical that we carefully represent the world in our tasks. Otherwise, students often end up making haphazard guesses or grasping for memorized answers – all behaviours that we don’t want to encourage in our future experts. The solution to this is to show the situation directly to students! During in-person classes, I often physically demonstrate the situation using equipment, so they get to see the real thing happening. The next best thing to this is videos, like this one:

This video provides the realistic context for a sequence of straightforward questions in a quiz. The questions are chosen to scaffold student thinking and model the thought processes of an expert. While experts are not likely exploring the static electric phenomena of pop bottles, the question sequence models how an expert would attempt to explain this situation if it was seen for the first time. These two elements, a realistic scenario and expert-like questions, help make this quiz an authentic task.

Quiz - Static Quiz - A - PRACTICE QUIZ.docx

The Quiz Process

Our science quizzes usually have three steps: (1) students make observations, (2) they write the quiz, and (3) they make corrections or improvements to their quiz work using a model solution. We assess the quality of the students’ original quiz work and how carefully they made their corrections and improvements. We call this our instant feedback quiz. This runs very smoothly during our in-person classes and online. For virtual teaching, students submit their work twice: once after their individual work is complete; and again after the model solution has been released and they make their corrections and improvements in a different colour. Ideally, students do their quiz work written out by hand and scan it to submit. The model solution we provide for this quiz in the quiz document. I hope you find this approach to quizzes interesting and helpful! You can find more static electricity scenarios for evaluations here. Our quizzes and tests for grade 9 are available here.