Authentic assessment

Travel plans

Age of students: 10 – 12

Subjects and topic: English, Geography, World History, Mathematics, Arts and Crafts

Learning scenario: Students will be divided in groups of 4-5 participants. Each group will be asked to pick a country of their choice and to do some basic research on the history of the country, its language and its main distinctive features. They will be asked to consult the following sources:

• Daily newspapers

• Travel brochures

• Ask parents or grandparents about their preferred tourist destination

• The Internet

With a selection of the materials gathered, they can be asked to prepare an informational poster using the collage technique.

Authentic assessment: Half of the groups will be asked to play the role of travel agents (1 group =1 travel agent). The other half will be asked to play the role of customers (1 group = 1 customer). Through a turn-based system, each group of customers will visit each travel agent at least once.

• Travel agents will try to convince their customers by explaining the most salient facts about the country's history, language and culture.

• Each group of customers will have a budget of 5,000 units of token money, that they can spend "visiting" the different travel destinations offered by the travel agents.

• After visiting all travel agents, each group of customers will need to deliberate about how to distribute their budget, in order to reflect how convinced they were by the quality of the presentations delivered by the travel agents. They can decide to spend all of it on one destination, or to divide it among the different ones.

• They will "pay" travel agents by extending cheques. The total amount of the cheques extended by each group of customers cannot exceed their budget.

• At the end of the first round of the assessment, the roles of customers and travel agents will be reversed.

Connection with learning theories: This learning scenario includes connectivist elements (students will be asked to combine the different pieces of information obtained from the different sources into a coherent presentation, understanding the links among e.g. a childhood reading of "The Treasure Island" by a grandparent with his decision to book a ticket for a cruise to the Pacific Islands later in his/her life) with a constructivist approach (each group of students will build a common understanding of the history of a country by combining different pieces of information contributed by individual members, under the guidance of the instructor, forcing themselves to ask questions and look for answers to fill in the perceived gaps in comprehension).