Authentic Assessment Defense of Authentic

Authentic Assessment Defense of Authentic Assessment An answer to the question, why is my child being tested through the practice of authentic assessment? It is perhaps only understandable that a parent wants and expects his or her child's education to resemble that parent's own educational journey.

However, although traditional forms of assessment may provide a certain level of security in their structure and sense of certainty, an advocate of authentic assessment would contend that traditional assessments paint an incomplete picture of a child's true skills, and ability to take part in meaningful work.

An authentic assessment, in contrast, provides a picture of how a child is able to use the skills he or she has been taught in a productive and meaningful fashion, and gives a portrait of the child as an individual, not merely an example of how the child measures up to an inflexible and rather arbitrary numerical standard.

What is authentic assessment? Authentic assessment strives to help students become productive citizens who are capable of using what they learn in school to act in meaningful ways in the real world when they graduate. The philosophy of authentic assessment is that to measure its own excellence or lack thereof, a school must ask students to perform meaningful tasks "that replicate real world challenges to see if students are capable of doing so," unlike multiple choice tests (Muller, 2006, "What is Authentic Assessment?").

Think of how many things the average adult has forgotten that he or she learned in school, simply because the student had to learn facts for a test, regurgitate those facts on the page after cramming for a night, which results in the student quickly dismissing the relevance of that learning unit. Authentic assessment strives to work against the common cry of students that what is learned in school is meaningless and irrelevant.

No one works and completes true and false exams for a living, in search of a meaningful life, but critical thinking, reason, and working with others are all skills, not innate behaviors that must be learned and are best tested through authentic assessments.

What is a specific example of an authentic assessment that you would (or do) use in your current or future classroom? Under a classroom regime that embraces authentic assessment, teachers actually do 'teach to the test' -- but not to standardized tests, for the authentic tests in constructed by the teachers must be meaningful.

For example, when studying the history of Colonial America, an authentic assessment might be as simple as administering an open-ended test to "ask students to describe the geographic, economic, social and political consequences of the Revolutionary War" in a coherent essay, using their own words (Muller, 2006, "Select an Authentic Task").

How is authentic assessment different from traditional assessment measures? Such an open-ended test would demand critical thinking, unlike a multiple choice exam that merely requires students to select a response from a teacher-constructed list, not create response from their own cognitive imagination (Muller, 2006, "Select an Authentic Task").However, far better than any kind of purely paper-based test, asking students to write an analytic paper, design a multimedia or PowerPoint presentation in work groups, or to debate issues of Colonial America as if they were Revolutionaries and Royalists would draw upon even more meaningful skills and force students to demonstrate their knowledge of key concepts, such as why the colonials were outraged, and why Americans were so passionate about representation in Parliament.

Working in groups and collaborating, communicating through images and words, and using logical and analytical reasoning of the Founding Fathers, as deployed in the original historical setting demands students use skills, not merely learn facts. What are the benefits/advantages of authentic assessments over traditional assessment measures? Educators as well as parents often feel a certain sense of frustration when phasing into a program of authentic assessment.

One teacher stated: "I often get frustrated when my students constantly ask me whether they think their work is any good or not, or when they ask me if I think they are finished with some task. I want them to learn to judge those things for themselves.

I need to teach more of that" (Muller, 2006, "Select an Authentic Task").Self-evaluation is an important part of a student's progress as an independent learner, and without learning such skills, a future college student will have no criteria to answer such important questions as: 'how much time to I have to put into this class outside of lecture hours?' Or 'what should I major in and what career is likely to be fulfilling, given my abilities and interests?' Unlike traditional assessments, authentic assessments encourage.