Exploring Authentic Assessment

The staff at my school have been working with the Growing Success Document since it was released, as our board participated in a pilot project involving the roll-out.  So we are all very familiar with the concepts of assessment For, As and Of learning.  We recognize that we need to strike a balance between traditional teaching and learning styles and more authentic forms of assessment and learning.  We are all familiar with the use of Learning Goals, Success Criteria and Rubrics to help students understand the goals of the curriculum, and what they need to do in order to demonstrate their learning. And we try to practice peer and self assessment as much as possible.  I recall when the document was first released how many of my colleagues were happy to see such a comprehensive guide to assessment that actually makes sense.

Our only concern was that with less emphasis on traditional forms of assessment such as tests, administrators would take that too far and suggest that all traditional testing is useless and encourage people not to use tests as legitimate forms of assessment.  We were concerned because direct instruction and testing is still very useful in some areas and necessary in some cases.  And our post-secondary students, including apprenticeship students still need to be prepared to write tests when they leave high school because the “real world” still uses tests to assess knowledge and ability to perform.  Our concerns proved valid for a few years as some of our admin proceeded to “vilify” tests.  Fortunately, our current admin sees the value in all forms of assessment, including tests.

So it did not surprise me, when I read of research completed between 2002 and 2012, about Asian Post Secondary Programs using very little authentic assessment, only traditional testing.  The article, “Authentic Assessment of Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudesby ” Brenda C. Litchfield and John V. Dempsey (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.queensu.ca/doi/10.1002/tl.20130/full)was published in 2015, and I believe the shift towards authentic assessment is still not taking hold in our post secondary institutions.  And the workplace has been even more resistent to change.  Therefore, we still need to prepare students for tests.  But we know that authentic assessment is a deeper form of learning that will better prepare them for life in the 21st century.  “ The use of authentic assessment produces more in-depth learning and transfer (Fook and Sidhu 2010; Kearney and Perkins 2011; Svinicki 2004). When students participate in authentic tasks, they become actively involved in their learning.” (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.queensu.ca/doi/10.1002/tl.20130/full)

So how do we reconcile this? I think Inquiry Learning is a great combination of both worlds.  It allows for direct instruction and traditional testing to check for understanding of basic concepts and rote knowledge.  But then the students are given the freedom to ask their own questions and find their own answers within a framework provided by the teacher.  I am always cautious of theories and directives that suggest what we have been doing all this time is all wrong.  I think the true message in Growing Success is that teaching and learning is a reciprocal process and should encompass a variety of techniques for instruction and assessment and there needs to be a shift from teacher centered to student centered learning.  We also need to get better at tracking, assessing and quantifying observations of learning and conversations about learning so that students who struggle with written communication can be given credit for discussing what they know in a more organized, planned format.  We definitely need to get away from calculating marks based solely on what the student produced.  We need to find more creative  ways to find out what a student knows.  We should never hear the phrase, “that student was really smart but he failed because he never handed anything in…”.  If we know a student is “smart” then we are tasked with finding a means of expression that works for that student and allowing them to “show us what they know” in some other way.  If you really want the truth I think we need to get rid of marks altogether and focus on the learning, but that is for another discussion.

Inquiry learning also very nicely aligns with the suggestions in the article “21st Century Assessment”:

• Supports a balance of assessments, including high-quality standardized testing along with effective classroom formative and summative assessments
• Emphasizes useful feedback on student performance that is embedded into everyday learning
• Requires a balance of technology-enhanced, formative and summative assessments that measure student mastery of 21st century skills
• Enables development of portfolios of student work that demonstrate mastery of 21st century skills to educators and prospective employers
• Enables a balanced portfolio of measures to assess the educational system’s effectiveness at reaching high levels of student competency in 21st century skills

As a Cooperative Education teacher, experiential learning is not a new thing, my students do it every day.  “According to Gulikers, Bastiaens, and Kirschner (2004, 69), authentic assessment is “an assessment requiring students to use the same competencies, or combinations of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they need to apply in the criterion situation in professional life.” Students should be involved in situations and simulations that give them a deeper understanding of the demands that they will experience in their careers.”  (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.queensu.ca/doi/10.1002/tl.20130/full)  But it is possible for a creative teacher to simulate these aspects of learning in the classroom if they engage in an online, real-world project of some sort.

Meyers and Nulty say “Course activities should do five things:

1. Be authentic, real-world, and relevant.
2. Be constructive, sequential, and interlinked.
3. Require students to use and engage with progressively higher-order cognitive processes.
4. Be aligned with each other and the desired learning outcome.
5. Provide challenge, interest, and motivation to learn.”  [Meyers and Nulty (2009, 567)]

These are also the qualities in a good Coop placement, or an effective inquiry, or authentic online or community project.  All of these in my opinion are excellent examples of effective assessment tasks and will help students prepare for life in the 21st Century.

Tools to help with tracking Authentic Assessment:

Edsby portfolio feature

Hourrepublic.com (coop, SHSM and volunteer hour tracking, reflections, certifications etc.)

Seesaw

Edsby Private Comments feature

Google Forms and Doc Appender

Student self assessments
AudioBoom (app for recording and archiving conversations and observations)