Authentic Assessment in Infant & Toddler Care Settings: Review of Recent Research. This policy brief from the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine provides an overview of issues in implementing authentic assessment practices.
Authentic Assessment For Early Childhood Interv...
Authentic assessment evaluates whether the student can successfully transfer the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom to various contexts, scenarios, and situations. Authentic Assessment is grounded in theoretical best practices for teaching and learning and serves as an effective measure for course learning outcomes. In many ways, it can be considered the difference between measuring what students know vs. how they can apply that knowledge. These types of assignments will vary by discipline but typically require students to complete a project. For example, you may ask students to apply an engineering problem to a real world example, develop a web application, design a model, critically review case studies, or create multimedia presentations. This page has more information on authentic assessment.
An authentic assessment evaluates if the student can successfully transfer the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom to various contexts, scenarios, and situations beyond the classroom. Authentic assessments can include a myriad of assessment techniques including skill labs, experiments, presentations, simulations, role-plays, class/term projects, debates, discussions, etc. (University at Albany SUNY, n.d.).
Consider the way physicians, professional engineers, electricians, teachers, firefighters, and other professionals are assessed. Students of these professions must provide direct evidence they are competently applying learned knowledge/skills before being allowed to perform them in the real world. This is accomplished by way of an authentic assessment and does not solely rely on a written or oral exam (traditional assessment) (Mueller, n.d.).
Lastly, authentic assessments do not have to be chosen over traditional assessments. A mix of both types of assessments can be effective, and in some cases (depending on the course objectives and outcomes), required.
Well-designed summative assessments can be authentic assessments requiring students to think like a practitioner of the field/discipline (Wiggins, 1998). Authentic (summative) assessments require a significant investment of time from both the student and the instructor. The student will be required to think critically and apply a myriad of skills (merging those learned within the course with those learned outside the course) to approach, evaluate, and solve a problem which may take weeks to solve (e.g. a final project). The instructor will need to take more time to evaluate and grade the students' work than they would if applying a traditional assessment technique such as a multiple choice exam.
The fourth step (RUBRIC) measures the student's performance on the authentic task(s). Rubrics are essential for structuring the authentic assessment. To start building the rubric, use the criteria established in Step 3 and then decide whether to create an analytic rubric or holistic rubric.
An assessment is the determinant factor of successful learning. Ideally, an assessment is not only conducted at the end of learning. Therefore, there is a need for an authentic assessment. In learning the Indonesian language, there are still many teachers who have not been able to carry out an authentic assessment. Thus, there is a need for an authentic assessment model in learning the Indonesian language. The first step in developing the assessment model was by interviewing the Indonesian language teachers. The interview results were then analyzed to consider and develop the authentic assessment model prototype in learning the Indonesian language. Based on the teacher interview results, many teachers were found to have not promoted an authentic assessment in their Indonesian language learning. Although the teachers have long years of service, it does not mean the teachers understand and promote the authentic assessment appropriately. Therefore, there is a need for an authentic assessment model in learning the Indonesian language.
Educators define authentic assessment as an approach to measure student performance in a direct, relevant way to see if the learning objectives were met. Educators might use projects such as reports, journals, speeches, videos and interviews with the students to measure their understanding of the subject material.
For example, an authentic assessment on the expedition of Lewis and Clark would grade students on journals they wrote imagining themselves as the explorers, or have them draw a map showing the route which Lewis and Clark traveled.
Do it often: While it takes time and effort to plan and carry out authentic assessments, they are very rewarding for both the student and the teacher. When teachers first begin using them with a new class, they should expect some challenges and work through them as best they can. With repeated use of authentic assessment, teachers and students will become more comfortable with the process and come to enjoy the satisfaction that comes from completing holistic projects.
Authentic assessment has played a pivotal role in driving curricular and instructional changes in the context of global educational reforms. Since the 1990s, teacher education and professional development programs in many education systems around the globe have focused on the development of assessment literacy for teachers and teacher candidates which encompasses teacher competence in the design, adaptation, and use of authentic assessment tasks or performance assessment tasks to engage students in in-depth learning of subject matter and to promote their mastery of the 21st-century competencies (e.g., Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000; Koh, 2011a, 2011b, 2014; Shepard et al., 2005; Webb, 2009). Although many of the 21st-century competencies are not new, they have become increasingly in demand in colleges and workplaces that have shifted from lower-level cognitive and routine manual tasks to higher-level analytic and interactive tasks (e.g., collaborative problem solving) (Darling Hammond & Adamson, 2010). The amount of new information is increasing at an exponential rate due to the advancement of digital technology. Hence, rote learning and regurgitation of facts or procedures are no longer suitable in contemporary educational contexts. Rather, students are expected to be able to find, organize, interpret, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and apply new information or knowledge to solve non-routine problems.
In short, this section presents a detailed explanation of the concept of authentic assessment. The remaining sections of this article will include a comparison of authentic assessment and conventional assessment, criteria for authenticity in authentic assessment, authentic assessment research in educational contexts (research problems/questions and methods included), and future research in authentic assessment.
According to Wiggins (1989, 1998), assessment is central to learning and must be linked to real-world demands. In these articles, some of the criteria for authentic assessment are overlapping. They can be summarized into eight criteria:
Fourth, in authentic assessment, students are given opportunities to rehearse, practice, look for useful resources, and receive timely quality feedback so as to improve the quality of performance or product. Students also need to present their work publicly and be given the opportunity to defend it. This suggests that assessment for learning or formative assessment practice can be easily incorporated into authentic assessment.
This criterion clearly indicates that students need to engage in construction or production of knowledge instead of reproduction of knowledge. Construction of knowledge is expressed in written and oral discourse. Examples of construction of knowledge are writing an article for a newsletter, performing a musical piece of work, creating a poster for a science fair, completing a group project, and designing a digital portfolio. All of these authentic assessments require students to engage in higher-order thinking, problem solving, communication, and collaboration. At the same time, students also need to present and defend their work in public.
This criterion underscores the importance of having a value dimension in assessment tasks. To be intrinsically motivating for students, authentic tasks must have aesthetic, utilitarian, or personal value in the eyes of the learner.
The social processes of an authentic assessment must resemble those of a professional context. If the professional context or real-life situation requires collaboration with peers in solving problems, then the assessment should also involve students in collaboration and problem solving. However, it is important to note that if a professional context or real-life situation typically requires individual work then the assessment should not enforce collaboration. In other words, fidelity of the social processes in authentic assessment to those in a real-life situation is essential.
The best way to design an authentic assessment is to determine the skills that need assessing and develop a real-world problem that would require those skills to solve. An example of an accounting assessment could be taking a company's financial books and balancing them.
There are many different kinds of authentic assessment depending on the subject, student age, and application. Some authentic assessments are performance-based, interviews, exhibitions, multimedia projects, oral presentations, and group projects.
Five important components of authentic assessment involve the characteristics vital for authentic evaluation in a learning environment. The five components are real-world problems, complexity, ambiguous answers, actionable and meaningful.
Everyone has sat down and taken a test consisting of multiple-choice questions. Many of them probably wondered how the test showed what they could do or how the test applied to real life. Multiple-choice tests are part of a group of tests called traditional assessment. But what does that have to do with authentic assessment? Authentic assessments were designed to fix the problems with conventional assessments.
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