Assessment Strategies

In his essay, “The Case for Authentic Assessment”, Wiggins compares authentic assessments to traditional standardized tests. Although that direct comparison isn’t necessarily relevant in most higher education courses, we can pull some key traits of authentic assessments from that comparison. Authentic assessments

• Require students to perform, in a real world (or simulated real-world) context, all of the tasks an adult or professional would engage in to apply what they’ve learned.
• Involve open-ended and ill-structured problems.
• Require learners to adopt a role to “rehearse for the complex ambiguities of the ‘game’ of adult and professional life.”
• Require learners to justify their answer as well as the process they used to decide on that answer.
• Are realistic, in that they aren’t timed, allow learners to use resources that would be available to them.

Using authentic assessments can require more effort and planning on the part of the instructor. Despite that increase in effort, both learners and instructors can benefit when a course uses authentic assessments. One of the benefits that applies to both learners and instructors is the increase in interest and engagement in the task. For instructors, it is much more interesting to explore and evaluate an array of different answers and approaches (and can be educational for the instructor, too). Learners have more motivation to work on the assessment: it is novel, creates a direct connection between the assessment and the “real” world, and clearly demonstrates to the learner how much they’ve learned and where they still have room to grow (i.e. authentic assessments are much more transparent to the learner).

Other benefits for instructors include an increased awareness of what students’ strengths and areas for growth are (both with respect to individual students and the collective), and an opportunity to connect with each individual learner. Since authentic assessments are directly tied to learning objectives, an instructor knows, with less ambiguity, what objectives students are meeting and which ones they are not. With authentic assessments, instructors get to connect with learners as they see the unique approaches each individual learner uses to solve the ill-structured problem. Many instructors teaching online value every opportunity to connect with learners they may never interact with face-to-face.

In addition to being more engaging, authentic assessments are usually more equitable for the diverse learners in a course. The design and selection of multiple-choice questions can include implicit biases that disadvantage some learners. Because authentic assessments are more transparent, don’t have a single right answer and require learners to justify their process and their answer, every learner has an opportunity to ask questions, identify and use resources, and “make their case” as to how their answer demonstrates their learning.

Because authentic assessments are tied directly to the learning objectives of a course, program, or discipline, the examples provided here are of general categories/types of authentic assessments.

• Case studies
• Simulations (many role-playing simulations can be used online)
• Writing to a real audience – for example, a policy brief that might be shared with a legislator, or writing a pamphlet geared toward a lay audience.
• Community-partnered research or project development

The key to grading authentic assessments is to have a rubric that keeps the grader’s focus on the most important standards you want learners to meet. The Online Teaching at Michigan site has a guide on creating and using rubrics. 

Practical Tips:

• The first step to creating an authentic assessment is to write learning objectives that describe how learners will demonstrate their learning.
• If you typically use essays for assessing student learning, frame the writing assignment for an audience other than the instructor/instructional team, and ideally, find individuals who are part of that audience to provide feedback to the learners.
• Have students reflect on their own academic performance on each assessment. Having them identify their own misconceptions and mistakes enhances their learning, helps to develop their metacognitive abilities, and is representative of what a professional must do when they err.
• Have students create a lightweight portfolio where they reflect on what they learned from each assignment (either through making mistakes or by engaging in the learning that occurs when someone is assessed).
• Explore libraries of case studies online (e.g. Case Consortium at Columbia University, National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science, and the Michigan Sustainability Cases)