This work, Authentic Assessment, is the fifth book in the series Global Education in the 21st Century by Series Editor Tasos Barkatsas. In this book a number of international academics explore the concept of authentic assessment as it applies in both tertiary and school education.
In its broadest definition authentic assessment is the measurement of intellectual accomplishments that are worthwhile, significant, and meaningful. But as the contributors to this work illustrate, authentic assessment is an important pedagogical structure. It is a concept more closely defined as an umbrella term that seeks to immerse learners in environments where they can gain highly practical, lifelong learning skills.
Authentic assessment has been on the educational agenda for a number of years. The term ‘authentic assessment’ was first coined by Wiggins (1989) in school contexts. He noted that authentic tasks replicate real-world challenges and standards of performance that experts or professionals (e.g., mathematicians, scientists and teachers) typically face in the field.
A number of authors have since aligned authentic assessment with performance assessment. Shepard (2000) noted that authentic tasks are often performance-based, and include complex and ill-structured problems that are well aligned with the rigorous and higher-order learning objectives in a reformed vision of curriculum.
In reality all authentic assessments are performance assessments because they require students to construct extended responses, to perform on something, or to produce a product. Both process and product are crucial to authentic assessments, and hence formative assessments—open questioning, descriptive feedback, self- and peer assessments etc., all play an important part in the process of authentic assessments.
Koh (2017) notes that authentic tasks assess not only students’ authentic performance or work, but also their dispositions such as persistence in solving messy and complex problems, positive habits of mind, growth mindset, resilience and grit, and self-directed learning. For teachers authentic assessment enables the provision of descriptive feedback, self- and peer assessment using criteria and standards as in the form of holistic or analytic rubrics. This is well illustrated by Rogers (Chapter 10) when she explores a Comprehensive Online Place Value Assessment Tool for Year 3–6 Teachers. Her work identifies the advantages of reflection and feedback in the learning process.
If the purpose of authentic assessment is to provide students with ample opportunity to engage in authentic tasks so as to develop, use, and extend their knowledge, higher-order thinking, and other 21st-century competencies, then
In a similar manner Tan and Kidman (Chapter 2) examine authentic assessment as activities engaging students in authentic inquiry processes involving higher order thinking skills relating to the real world. They present an integrative review of how authentic assessment is understood, and investigated, in STEM education research. By reviewing the empirical studies that focus on authentic assessment in STEM education and analyzing how the conflation of authentic assessment terms are conceptualized in terms of its constituent components in STEM education, they provide an insight into how authentic assessment can strengthen STEM learning and teaching.
Gulikers, Bastiaens, and Kirschner (2004) defined authentic assessment as assessment that require students to use the competence, or a combination of knowledge, skills and behaviors that should be applied in their professional life situations. Ersozlu, Ledger and Hobbs (Chapter 3) argue that authentic assessment aligns well with the functionalities of a virtual learning environment in their chapter about virtual simulation in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Their findings indicate that Virtual simulations are designed to imitate experiences that professionals face in their every-day work life and thus offer unique learning environments capable of providing opportunities for authentic assessment tasks within initial teacher education programs.
This virtual online approach to authentic assessment is also evident in Oates and Denny’s explanation of PeerWise (Chapter 4). Through a range of measurements, their analysis identified that students experienced meaningful shifts in their Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of mathematics resulting from peer-feedback and facilitated by the online interactions provided by the PeerWise platform.
In addition to relating to the future profession and real-world contexts, there is evidence that authentic assessment allows the learner to extrapolate the lessons learnt through such assessment to their own understanding of the world (Lloyd & Davidson, 2005). Law (Chapter 12) also explores how we can address this issue of allowing learners to extrapolate from lessons learnt when describing the humanising of mathematics education. His study reinstates the advocacy of humanising mathematics through the designing of authentic
A number of researchers have noted that authentic assessment is a strong measure of a student’s skills and knowledge as it relates to specific contexts and is often related to future work skills (Lloyd & Davidson, 2005). This potential for capstone courses at university to be used as sites for future work skills is illustrated in chapters by McLaughlin, Littlewood, Kennedy and Barkatsas (Chapter 7) and in the work of Ryan and Wingrove (Chapter 8). Both groups of authors conclude that authentic learning and assessment is undeniably critical to effective capstone course design and teaching, whilst describing different discipline contexts, the importance of assessments that were were situated within a socially constructed model requiring participation in a community of peers, that allowed for reflective pedagogy; and that allowed for feedback and evaluation from other practising professionals was explicit.
Boud and Falchikov (2006) defined the concept of authentic assessment as assessment that meets academic standards and prepares students for future learning in work and life. But the adaptation of authentic assessment in mathematics is problematic. Both Zhang, Zhang and Liu (Chapter 5) and Aktas, Akyildiz and Dede (Chapter 6) approach this discussion from different viewpoints, but both conclude that whilst traditional mathematics education isolates content knowledge from real-life situations and focuses mainly on tedious and repetitive problem solving, authenticity and authentic assessments play an important role in allowing mathematics to be applied to real life.
Authentic assessments also have the capacity to capture students’ dispositions such as positive habits of mind, growth mindset, persistence in solving complex problems, resilience and grit, and self-directed learning. The use of scoring criteria and human judgments are two of the essential components of authentic assessments (Wiggins, 1989).
This is well illustrated by Kasimatis, Moutsios-Rentzos and Kalavasis (Chapter 16) who introduce a systemic approach to authentic assessment in tertiary engineering education. Through a process of systemic reflections, they describe how the subjects in their study observe, reflect and act upon a system that explicitly includes themselves, thus being authentic for the system. This approach supports the educational unit to develop an attitude of mindful participation with a community around matters of shared concern.
In Chapter 15 Fabiano Pereira dos Santos, Ivan Fortunato and Juanjo Mena provide a literature review of teacher performance evaluation approach from Brazilian perspective.
Bouras and Papadopoulou (Chapter 16) provide an insight into the investigation, recording and capture of the views of parents whose children attend Pilot and Experimental schools in Greece. They examine the contribution and
The final chapter in this work by Arcoudis, Papadopoulou and Chalkiadaki (Chapter 17) examines the paradigm of authentic assessment and evaluation in authentic leadership with regards to school principals. The study highlights the relationship between authentic leadership and authentic evaluation by outlining the characteristics of authentic leadership and describing some of the tools, methods and approaches of authentic assessment that could be incorporated in school principal selection and evaluation procedures when designing a policy for authentic leadership in education.
These chapters and the totality of this book illustrate how authentic assessment is an effective measure of intellectual achievement or ability as it requires the demonstration of deep understanding, higher-order thinking and complex problem solving through the performance of rich and exemplary authentic tasks.
If nothing else, this book underlines the value of authentic assessment as a powerful tool for assessing students’ 21st-century competencies in the context of global educational reforms.
References
Boud, D., & Falchikov, N. (2006). Aligning assessment with long‐term learning. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(4), 399–413.
Gulikers, J. T., Bastiaens, T. J., & Kirschner, P. A. (2004). A five-dimensional framework for authentic assessment. Educational Technology Research and Development, 52(3), 67.
Koh, K. H. (2017). Authentic assessment. In Oxford research encyclopedia of education.
Lloyd, D., & Davidson, P. (2005). Task-based integrated-skills assessment. In D. Lloyd, P. Davidson, & C. Coombe (Eds.), The fundamentals of language assessment: A practical guide for teachers in the Gulf (pp. 157–166). TESOL Arabia.
Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4–14.
Wiggins, G. (1989). A true test: Toward more authentic and equitable assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 70(9), 703–713.