Authentic Assessment

Abstract

This article focuses on how authentic assessment can provide a holistic evaluation of student achievement. Authentic assessment is credited with better preparing students for the working world than traditional assessment methods by encouraging the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as the integration of past and present learning across disciplines. The author outlines how teachers can implement authentic assessment in K–12 classrooms in addition to offering some thoughts about the future of the instrument.

Overview

History. Assessments have been used to evaluate student progress since Socrates' time, and as early as 200 B.C., China had its own version of the civil service examination. In the United States, Robert Thorndike's educational work in the early 1900s helped convince the country of the value of assessment, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, standardized testing began gaining popularity. During the 1970s, many states introduced minimum competency testing requirements for grade promotion, and in the 1980s states began implementing statewide testing programs. Some states used standardized testing to assess their students, while others contracted with test makers to develop tests intended to better match their state curriculum guidelines.

With so much testing being conducted, it was only a matter of time before the testing instruments themselves came under further scrutiny. Traditional, standardized types of assessment were criticized for involving limited tasks—such as reading and answering a multiple-choice item—and for testing only lower-level thinking skills; ignoring the need for students to develop real-life, higher-order skills. In response, beginning in the late 1980s, educators began considering authentic assessment as a viable alternative to standardized assessments. By the 1990s, states started to veer away from standardized tests and look toward assessing higher-level skills through authentic assessment, which reports success as the percentage of students at or above proficiency.

Purpose. Authentic assessment, also called performance based assessment, is designed to help students participate actively in real-life tasks and problem-solving to teach them skills which they will be able to use throughout their lives. Authentic assessment requires students to use their prior knowledge, recent learning, and relevant skills to complete complex, real-world projects. By tying classroom material to real-life situations, authentic assessment can help answer the question, "Why do we have to learn this?" The best type of authentic assessment evaluates not just how well students memorize materials, but how well they apply what they learn. Authentic assessments essentially re-create what students will encounter when they enter the working world by informing them about a task beforehand and allowing them to prepare for it by working on mastering the necessary competencies. Forms of authentic assessment can include debates, simulations, presentations, or demonstrations.

Effective authentic assessments engage students in a context and, more specifically, they:

• Focus on essential content
• Focus on concepts rather than specialized skills
• Are in-depth
• Lead to students to other challenges and questions
• Are capable of producing a quality product or service instead of just one correct answer
• Focus on what students know and further the growth of student knowledge base and skills
• Are comprised of criteria that students understand and agree upon before the project begins
• Allow students to demonstrate competency in multiple ways
• Are designed to allow many points of view and analyses
• Are scored based on the essence of the task rather than correct answers.

Applications

Authentic assessment encourages students to apply what they learn across different subjects. Writing, for example, can easily be integrated into many subject areas. If mathematics instructors require students to provide written explanations of how they solved a problem, instructors can more accurately evaluate a student's mathematical abilities. With an explanation, they can see how well a student understands key concepts, rather than rely on whether or not the student simply got the right answer. Literature instructors can also use authentic assessment to help students understand the importance of setting, character development, and comparison and contrast of classic and modern story plots. Students' written responses to a text can help determine whether they have derived meaning from a text, which is something that more traditional multiple-choice assessments cannot do.

Authentic assessment tasks are also open-ended, meaning that they can be solved through multiple approaches, mirroring what students will encounter later in life. In order to actively engage them in learning, assignments should be relevant and meaningful to students. By enabling students to discover multiple solutions or interpretations to a project, authentic assessment may also help keep the performance gap among differing cultures at bay, as well as eliminate testing bias.

Authentic assessment uses graduated ratings and structured observation checklists to record the extent to which children display desired behaviors. Graduated ratings are multi-level designations meant to provide a more accurate measure of student mastery than traditional assessments. Terms such as 'Always,' 'Sometimes,' 'Occasionally,' and 'Rarely' or 'Mastery,' 'Performs Most of the Time,' 'Beginning to Perform,' or 'Does Not Perform' pinpoint the students' skill levels in a much more specific manner than simple terms like 'Yes' and 'No' or 'Does' and 'Does Not.'

Researchers have also demonstrated that data culled from multiple sources, settings, and occasions provide a more accurate assessment of young children's capabilities and needs than standardized assessments, making them especially helpful in evaluating children with developmental needs.

Authentic vs. Traditional Assessment. Additionally, authentic assessment can be an effective tool for evaluating young students' functional behavior in their everyday environments. Traditional testing may not accurately evaluate young students if an unfamiliar adult administers the test, test demands are unrealistic, or if norm-referenced tests are used to rank students rather than individually evaluate their abilities. The holistic approach of authentic assessment is particularly important to instructors of students with special needs because instructors need to have a clear understanding of what their students can and cannot do in order to provide suitable instruction. Since authentic assessment allows students to exhibit different points of view and different problem-solving approaches, authentic assessment can be more accommodating than standardized testing, which requires that all testing be conducted in a uniform manner. Additionally, students with significant difficulties are generally excluded from the standardization sample; if the assessment does not accommodate for differences, students are penalized and results can be inaccurate.

Authentic assessment and traditional assessment differ greatly. Authentic assessment requires students to use prior knowledge alongside recent learning to complete complex projects with real-life applications. Traditional assessment relies on using indirect items that stand in for what was taught and from which inferences are drawn about student competencies. Authentic assessment requires students to put classroom lessons into a real-life context, while traditional assessment tends to determine whether or not students can recall what was learned in a context rarely replicated outside of the classroom. Authentic assessment gives students an entire body of work that must be completed as an overall project, while traditional assessment is usually a paper-and-pencil or computer-based instrument in which there is only one correct answer. Authentic assessment attempts to determine whether students can complete complex projects and provide thorough, well-considered answers, whereas traditional assessment generally requires students to select or write the correct response without justification or reflection.

Authentic Assessment at Different Grade Levels. Authentic assessment can be used in different ways depending on students' ages. In early grades, parents, childcare workers, and instructors can all be involved in the assessment process in order to provide a more accurate, well-rounded picture of each child's development over time. For younger children, authentic assessment systematically records developmental observations through a span of several years, recording the child's natural, daily behaviors by those who are most familiar with them. This information can be garnered by

• Directly observing and recording a child's behavior,
• Informally interviewing a child,
• Using rating scales, and
• Observing natural or facilitated play as well as the daily living skills a child possesses.

Children will act more naturally in surroundings that are more familiar to them—such as their homes, schools, and communities—than they will in an unfamiliar environment. Additionally, being observed and tested by a professional who is a stranger, rather than a by parent or teacher, can be intimidating to a child and, thereby, affect their performance. Since authentic assessment can happen in an informal, natural setting, it can provide a more accurate picture of behavior and capability. It can show how children behave in real-life situations such as group time at school, during games on the playground, doing chores, going to the store, and nighttime activities at home, which are situations that cannot be reproduced in a classroom or laboratory setting. Authentic data can provide samples of ongoing behavior regarding competencies including thinking, language, social, motor, self-regulatory and care skills. These behaviors can also be observed over an extended period of time, providing a much more holistic view of a child's progress than a single, 30-minute test.

Using authentic assessment for middle school students meets a basic tenet of middle school curriculum construction by helping students increase their problem-solving abilities. Students evaluated under authentic assessment recall previous lessons, deepen their understanding, and integrate a broad range of skills across disciplines in particular contexts to develop new ideas for specific purposes. Tasks like a service-learning project can be designed to require sustained work of students while allowing them to have some choice in how they will complete the project. Students of middle-school age can also be given the duties of creating and executing their own research.

High schools which emphasize developing self-confidence, self-motivation, resilience, and adaptability can use authentic assessment in many ways. Ninth and tenth graders can take classes that build these skills, and then, during their final two years of high school, use them within interdisciplinary tasks to demonstrate their competency.

For example, students could complete a graduation portfolio of three separate folios exhibiting job readiness, civic understanding, and personal reflection. A job readiness folio could include a polished résumé, a completed college application, a completed job application, letters of reference, and a reflection paper on the student's readiness for the world after high school. The second folio could detail a student's service to their school or community as well as contain essays in which the student makes a well researched, reasonable argument about a civic issue and describes how he or she will become an active citizen after graduation. The last folio could represent the student's lifetime learning through papers showcasing their best work in writing, mathematics, science, and a subject which particularly interests them. It could also include a list of books the student has read during their four years of high school and a reflection paper addressing how he or she plans to become a lifelong learner.

Another example of authentic assessment might be a senior project that all students must complete in order to graduate. Rather than writing a term paper read only by their instructor, students would choose a subject that interests them, conduct research, and then create a product to exhibit to an audience. Students would be responsible for setting up the room, arranging for community members to attend and provide feedback, sending reminders to committee members, providing visual aids, preparing presentation tools, and dressing appropriately.

Assigning projects like these enables students to acquire and demonstrate skills that will be useful far beyond high school. To facilitate learning, rubrics must be created to make both formative and summative assessment of all aspects of the projects, and the criteria incorporated into the rubrics must emphasize abilities that have been identified as important life skills such as presentation, organizational, and preparation skills.

Designing Authentic Assessment. To design an effective authentic assessment, the purposes and objectives of the activity should be clearly stated, and instructors should be clear on how they will use the results of the assessment. Clearly stated objectives tell students how they will be assessed and help them stay focused on the activity. Instructors should consider using rubrics to help facilitate the process.

The activity being assessed must also be designed to meet instructional goals and guide students towards applying what they have learned. The activity should have more than one possible answer or outcome to help students think things through and learn to deal with real-life situations. Additionally, instructors should consider allowing students to either help design, or entirely design, the activity. This input could also be made part of the assessment. Finally, authentic assessments should be administered at various points during the activity so that student progress can be charted, leading to a better overall view of how student learning was achieved.

Scoring Authentic Assessment. Testing and evaluation experts may have some concerns about scoring authentic assessments because, unlike standardized tests, they do not have objectively correct answers. Depending on context and desired outcomes, an instructor must determine whether a more holistic approach to scoring is called for or if analytical scoring is the appropriate choice for the evaluation. The scoring criteria must be established before administration of the assessment, and students must be informed of the criteria on which they will be scored. Checklists and rating scales should be used. Rubrics can be invaluable because they clearly state expectations in an understandable, systematic fashion. Written criteria should be used as a guideline to facilitate evaluation scoring.

Portfolios can also be an effective tool for authentic assessment. Portfolios can show how students progress over time, as well as incorporate both formal and informal items, making it possible to evaluate a larger range of cognitive skills. In addition, the final product should be a more reliable assessment instrument since it contains multiple examples of academic performance, which is decidedly different from high-stakes testing.

Portfolios also allow instructors to evaluate the student learning process. By selecting which examples of their work go into their portfolio, students are actively involved in their own assessment—making reflection a large part of the portfolio process. Portfolios require students to examine and analyze their own work, skills which are important to develop for the workplace. Examination and analysis also afford students the opportunity to discover the depth and breadth of their learning. From the very beginning when work first enters the portfolio, students reflect on each step of the learning process, gain an understanding of exactly what they have done, and, eventually, can see what they have learned across the entire project.

Reflection. Reflection can be a difficult concept to master. In the beginning, there may not be much depth and only cursory insight. Many students will just summarize what they have accomplished instead of analyzing it and determining exactly what they have learned. However, with some practice and the instructor's guidance, students can develop the ability to critically assess their work and expand the scope of their reflection (Cole, 1994).

Reflection can be divided into three categories:

• Reflection on action requires students to look back on what they have accomplished to review their actions and thoughts, as well as how these led to their outcomes.
• Reflection in action requires students to reflect on a task while carrying it out. An example might be a student who, while writing a story, realizes the story has no setting and begins creating one.
• Reflection for action requires students to reflect on what has been completed and then use these reflections to create constructive guidelines to follow for similar future tasks.

Authentic assessment can be a very effective tool for student assessment. However, because of the time and resource constraints posed by No Child Left Behind testing requirements, authentic assessment is again taking a back seat. If schools, school districts, and states can determine a method to incorporate authentic assessment into the classroom and use these results to meet No Child Left Behind testing requirements, students could benefit immensely. As things stand today, the best solution appears to be the development of authentic assessments from school, school district, or state directed content standards which can supplement standardized assessments.

Terms & Concepts

Authentic Assessment: A form of assessment that requires students to use prior knowledge, recent learning, and relevant skills to complete realistic, complex projects.

Criterion-Referenced Test: An assessment given to students to determine if specific skills have been mastered.

Formative Assessment: A type of assessment considered part of the instructional process and intended to provide information needed to help instructors adjust their instruction and help students learn while instruction is occurring.

High-Stakes Tests: Tests whose scores are used to make decisions that have important consequences for students, schools, school districts, and/or states and can include high school graduation, promotion to the next grade, resource allocation, and instructor retention.

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB): The latest reauthorization and a major overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the major federal law regarding K–12 education.

Norm-Referenced Test: An assessment administered to students to determine how well they perform in comparison to other students taking the same assessment.

Portfolio: A systematic collection of teacher observations and student work representing the student's progress and activities of a particular class. Portfolios often include partially completed projects, so as to show the different stages of development.

Reflection: The process of deriving meaning and knowledge from an experience and to consciously connect classroom learning to the experience.

Rubric: A set of ordered categories to which a given piece of work can be compared. It is a guide that shows how what learners do will be assessed and graded.

Standardized Tests: Tests that are administered and scored in a uniform manner, and the tests are designed in such a way that the questions and interpretations are consistent.

Summative Assessment: A form of assessment intended to summarize what students have learned and which are administered after instruction has been completed at the end of some predetermined point in time or instructional component.

Test Bias: Provable and systematic differences in the results of students taking a test which are discernible based on group membership, such as gender, socioeconomic standing, race, or ethnic group.

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Suggested Reading

Barell, J. (2016). Moving from what to what if? Teaching critical thinking with authentic inquiry and assessments. New York: Taylor and Francis.

Burke, K. (2005). How to assess authentic learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Fischer, C., & King, R. (1995). Authentic assessment: A guide to implementation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Forte, I., & Schurr, S. (1997). Authentic assessment. Nashville, TN: Incentive Publications, Inc.

Janesick, V. (2006). Authentic assessment primer. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

Karges-Bone, L. (2000). Productive instruction & authentic assessment. Carthage, IL: Teaching & Learning Co.