Fishing on a lake
Maybe it’s my background as a band and music teacher that makes me such a fan of authentic assessment. After all, in band it’s expected that people actually be able to play and perform, not just talk about playing and performing. In fact, music education often has the opposite problem of many other areas of education: rather than people who can talk about theory but not apply it, musicians can often play and perform but lack a fundamental understanding of music theory. But in much of academia, the expectations aren’t about “doing” tasks actively. That’s especially true in online learning, where assessment can easily fall into a rut of “read-write-reflect.” With authentic assessment, the goal is to do real world tasks, measuring actual performance. Authentic assessment is the difference between writing an essay about how to fish and actually going to the lake and bringing home supper.
Why Authentic Assessment?
John Mueller, creator of the Authentic Assessment Toolbox, lists four benefits of authentic assessment:
- Authentic Assessments are Direct Measures
- Authentic Assessments Capture Constructive Nature of Learning
- Authentic Assessments Integrate Teaching, Learning and Assessment
- Authentic Assessments Provide Multiple Paths to Demonstration
Authentic Assessment Examples
How do we do authentic assessment in our online courses? Our participants are classroom teachers, but we can’t directly measure classroom performance (not without the technological challenges of extensive digital video and the permission challenges of recording students anyway). But we can include activities where participants create projects that they can take back to their classrooms and use. Lesson plans are common authentic assessments in our courses, but we also have some bigger projects that give participants more significant end products.
Local History Project
The major assessment for Using Online Resources to Bring Primary Sources to the Classroom is a local history project where participants use primary sources to make connections between their local area and broader trends in the world or curriculum. For example, one past participant created a project connecting literature depicting Native American culture to the culture of a local tribe, both now and historically. Another project used a walking tour of the town in combination with primary sources to create a travel brochure highlighting local history.
Educational Game
In Simulations and Gaming Technologies for the Classroom, participants don’t just examine ways to use existing games for teaching: they actually create their own game during the course. Creating games themselves gives learners a deeper understanding of game mechanics than would be possible just through playing and using games created by others. This is a great example of how authentic assessment integrates learning with assessment; the process of building a game is a challenging learning activity, not just a way of measuring learning after the fact.
Interactive Multimedia Project
When Merging Educational Goals and Interactive Multimedia Projects was revised earlier this year, a major project was woven through a number of the modules. This allows students to have more time practicing using the multimedia tools (an authentic performance assessment in itself), and it provides a way to build a significant project rather than a collection of independent lesson plans. By the end of the course, participants have projects including example multimedia, an implementation plan, a timeline, and strategies to address problems that may occur.
Your Authentic Assessment
What have you done for authentic assessment in your classroom? Do you have a favorite project or authentic assessment success story you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you!
