essay in authentic assessment

Creating authentic assessments

How this will help:

Multiple choice questions often can’t tell an instructor everything they want to know about students’ learning. Thinking about what you, as an instructor, want to measure about student learning can help you design creative and authentic assessments to align with your learning objectives.

Assessment is a term that tends to have a lot of baggage around it in education, and it can mean a couple of different things: measuring the efficacy of a degree program’s curriculum or measuring a student’s understanding of course material, for example. This module focuses on different approaches to assessing student learning.

Multiple choice tests are one of the more common techniques, in higher education, for measuring a student’s understanding of a concept. With many multiple choice tests, even really well designed ones, the data most instructors are getting is how good their students are at answering multiple choice questions, not necessarily a measure of how well students understand course material. 

Essays are another common assessment technique deployed in higher education. Essays can demonstrate different kinds and levels of learning than multiple choice type exams, but they are usually written with a faculty/instructor audience in mind and don’t necessarily reflect the skills a course is designed to teach.

Authentic assessment is a term, coined in part by Grant Wiggins , for assessments that are tightly aligned with the learning objectives of a course or learning experience and have learners working on “real world” problems. Authentic assessments usually have more than one “correct” answer but can be evaluated using a rubric that provides assurance that the data obtained from the assessment is valid.

What makes an assessment authentic?

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 

What are the advantages of using authentic assessments?

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.

Examples of Authentic Assessments

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

Grading Authentic Assessments

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 )

University of Michigan

SEAS- Michigan sustainability cases 

Other Resources

Indiana University – Authentic assessments

University of Buffalo – National center for case study teaching in science: Case types & methods

Columbia University – Case consortium

Wiggins, Grant (1990) “The Case for Authentic Assessment,” Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation: Vol. 2 , Article 2. Retrieved May 18, 2020, from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol2/iss1/2  

Wiggins, G. (1989). A True Test: Toward More Authentic and Equitable Assessment. The Phi Delta Kappan, 70 (9), 703-713. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/20404004

Williams, J.B. (2004). Creating authentic assessments: A method for the authoring of open book open web examinations. In R. Atkinson, C. McBeath, D. Jonas-Dwyer & R. Phillips (Eds), Beyond the comfort zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference (pp. 934-937). Perth, 5-8 December. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/williams.html 

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Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence

Authentic assessments.

Nicole Messier, CATE Instructional Designer April 15th, 2022

WHAT? Heading link Copy link

Authentic assessments involve the application of knowledge and skills in real-world situations, scenarios, or problems. Authentic assessments create a student-centered learning experience by providing students opportunities to problem-solve, inquire, and create new knowledge and meaning.

Elements of Authentic Assessments

There are several elements to consider that make an assessment more “authentic” (Ashford-Rowe, 2014; Grant, 2021; Wilson-Mah, 2019;), including:

• Accuracy and validity – The accuracy of the assessment refers to how closely it resembles a real-world situation, problem, disciplinary norm, or field of study. The assessment validity refers to the alignment of grading criteria to the learning objectives, transferable skills (e.g., communication, critical thinking, etc.), workforce readiness skills, and disciplinary norms and practices.
• Demonstration of learning – The outcomes of an assessment should allow students to demonstrate learning in ways that reflect their field of study, for example, a performance or a product that is authentic to their future career. Or the assessment should allow for student choice based on interests and skills; for example, one group of students decides to create a podcast to demonstrate their learning in general education coursework.
• Transfer of knowledge – The assessment should provide the transfer of knowledge from theory to practice and from one task or experience to another. For example, students writing a blog post about a scientific principle that was demonstrated in current events replacing a traditional essay or paper on the scientific principle.
• Metacognition – The process of reflecting on learning should be purposefully planned for students to make connections to prior knowledge, experiences, and different subject areas. For example, metacognition can be encouraged in authentic assessments by asking students to evaluate their progress, self-assess their product or performance, and reflect on their thought processes and learning experiences during the authentic assessment.
• Collaboration – The assessments should provide opportunities for interaction that are aligned to the real-world situation. For example, if the task is typically completed by a team in the field, then the assessment should be completed collaboratively by a group.

• Flexibility – The assessment should provide flexibility in the timeline and due dates for meeting project benchmarks and deliverables to align with real-world tasks. For example, if the task would take a few weeks to complete while working full time then the timeline in the course should reflect this timing to ensure authenticity and manageability.
• Environment and tools – The environment and tools used to provide the assessment should be like the environments and tools in the students’ field of study or aligned with a real-world situation. For example, students taking a graphic design course utilizing software that is used in their field to create typography, logos, etc., or medical students practicing authentic tasks in a simulation room to mirror a hospital room.

Authentic assessments can also be referred to as alternative assessments or performance-based assessments. All of these assessments are considered “alternatives” to traditional high-stakes tests or research papers, and are based on the constructivist theory where students actively construct new meaning and knowledge.

Also, it is important to understand that authentic assessments can be used to assess students both formatively (during instruction) and summatively (when the instruction is over). Want to learn more about formative assessments or summative assessments? Please visit the Assessment & Grading Practices teaching guides in the Resources section of the CATE website.

Types of Authentic Assessments Heading link Copy link

Authentic assessments can be designed using different teaching methods like inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, problem-based learning, scenario-based learning, or design-based learning. Select each of the headings below to learn about how these teaching methods can support your design of authentic assessments.

Inquiry-based Learning

Inquiry-based learning involves the process of research and experimentation with complex questions and problems. Inquiry-based learning is structured around phases similar to the scientific method where students develop questions, experiment, and evaluate.

Elements of Inquiry-based Learning

• Identifying a problem or question.
• Making predictions or formulating hypotheses.
• Active construction of new knowledge through testing, research, and experimentation.
• Communication and discussion of results and new knowledge.
• Evaluation of process, data interpretation, and self-reflection.

The focus of inquiry-based learning is scientific thinking and reasoning. The process students use to discover new information can vary based on the type of inquiry process you select to use in the course.

One example of an inquiry process is the 5E model :

• Engagement Phase – connections are made to past and present learning.
• Exploration Phase – students engage in testing, research, or experimentation.
• Explanation Phase – students communicate and demonstrate their learning.
• Elaboration Phase – instructor extends students’ learning with new activities.
• Evaluation Phase – students self-assess and reflect on learning.

Inquiry-based learning can be designed for science courses such as natural sciences, social science, or health science courses. Grading of inquiry-based learning could be centered around the metacognition and critical thinking documented during the inquiry process as well as the deliverables submitted during each phase of the inquiry process.

Example – Inquiry-based Learning

An instructor decides to use inquiry-based learning during lab work in a physics course. Instead of providing students with step-by-step instructions on how to complete the lab, students are allowed to decide what data to collect, how to collect it, and how to analyze it to explain the physics principle or phenomenon. The instructor notices that student interactions increase as students voice their opinions and facilitate decision-making with their group (Nutt, 2020). Please see the Additional Resources section for more information on this example.

Please note that in some cases, inquiry-based learning is used as an umbrella term that encompasses numerous forms of inquiry learning like problem-based, scenario-based, and design-based learning. In this teaching guide, inquiry-based learning is modeled after research aligned with the scientific method and experimentation.

Problem-based Learning

Problem-based learning involves a dilemma or problem that needs to be solved. The problem-based learning experience is structured around the research process and the discovery of solutions.

Elements of Problem-based Learning

• Application of learning to real-world situations – the context of the problem.
• Alignment of learning objectives – the purpose behind the problem.
• Creates new knowledge while retrieving previous experiences and knowledge – the investigation of solutions to the problem.
• Communication of findings and/or collaboration with peers – the discussion or defense of solutions to the problem.
• Feedback and metacognition – how the problem improved student learning.

The focus of problem-based learning is typically on the research journey to solve real-world problems. This research journey involves an examination of previous knowledge, collection of new information, analysis, and determination of possible solutions. Grading of this type of problem-based learning could center around the documentation of the research process and the critical thinking used to determine solutions based on research.

Problem-based learning can also be designed for major coursework (e.g., a patient problem in medical training).  Students might be directed to determine one solution to the proposed problem and then students present their solutions and receive peer and instructor feedback on their presentation of the problem and solution. Grading of this type of problem-based learning could center around students’ ability to present the problem and defend the solution with research-based evidence.

Example – Problem-based Learning

An instructor decides to use problem-based learning in a teacher education course. The instructor creates several student personas with different learning problems. Students work in small groups during class to discuss the student persona and brainstorm ideas on the student persona’s learning problem based on prior knowledge. Students decide roles and the steps to complete the assessment. During the next class session, each small group explains their student persona’s diagnosed learning problem and describes examples of differentiation and scaffolding to adapt instruction to improve the student persona’s learning. Students receive feedback from their peers as well as the instructor.

Scenario-based Learning

Scenario-based learning involves a real-world scenario that prompts student learning. Scenario-based learning provides students opportunities to draw on previous experience and knowledge to complete authentic tasks.

Elements of Scenario-based Learning

• Realistic scenarios
• Contextualize learning from theory to application
• Incorporates retrieval of previous experience and knowledge
• Completion of authentic tasks to address the scenario
• Authentic tasks show alignment to learning objectives and workforce readiness

The focus of scenario-based learning is the application of learning in real-world scenarios through authentic tasks to demonstrate learning objectives, workforce readiness, and transferable skills (e.g., communication, critical thinking, etc.). Grading of scenario-based learning could be centered around the demonstration of learning objectives and workforce readiness through authentic tasks.

Scenario-based learning can be designed for major coursework in undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as undergraduate general education coursework. In major coursework, students can develop workforce readiness while demonstrating proficiency in learning objectives during the scenario-based learning. In undergraduate general education coursework, scenario-based learning can provide an understanding of the assessment’s importance which can improve student engagement and motivation, as well as support student development of transferable skills.

Example – Scenario-based Learning

An instructor decides to use scenario-based learning in a general education writing course. The instructor designs scenarios for students to understand audience-centered writing. An example of a writing scenario could involve a historical event or person, where students write a letter providing advice to a historical person or take on the role of a historical person to suggest ways to address the historical event. Another example of a writing scenario could involve a human resource problem at a company, where students are asked to create a memo or policy to address the problem. These scenarios provide students with a real-world context for a specific audience and purpose for each formative assessment (Golden, 2018).

Project-based Learning

Project-based learning involves student interest, choice, and autonomy to create a student-centered experience. Project-based learning can be completed individually or collaboratively. If project-based learning is completed collaboratively, then a group of students works together to demonstrate the application of their collective knowledge and experiences.

Stages of Project-based Learning

• Project planning – the student or group determines how they will demonstrate the learning objectives through a selected format (product or performance).
• Project starts – the student or group research topics aligned to learning objectives and analyzes the research collected or practices skills and prepares for the performance.
• Formative feedback – the student or group receives formative feedback on the project as well as self-assess their progress.
• Completion of the project – the student or group adjusts the project based on feedback and completes the product or performance preparation.
• Presentation – the student or group presents the product or performance to the class (synchronously or asynchronously).
• Reflection – the student or group reflects on learning and experience for metacognition and provides the instructor with feedback on the process.
• Assessment of the project – the student or group receives feedback from the instructor and/or peers and receives a grade on the project.

The focus of project-based learning is the application and assimilation of knowledge that is demonstrated in a product or performance. Students select the product or performance in project-based learning based on their interests and skills. The final product or performance is used as the summative assessment to confirm student outcomes and the project plan will have a timeline for submitting deliverables for formative feedback.

Project-based learning can be designed for major coursework in undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as undergraduate general education coursework. Allowing for student choice on how students demonstrate learning can help motivate and engage students in undergraduate general education coursework. In major coursework, students can demonstrate their proficiency in the learning objectives, professionalism, and transferable skills (e.g., communication, critical thinking, etc.) during the project.

Example – Project-based Learning

An instructor decides to create a summative authentic assessment using project-based learning in a social sciences course. The instructor provides a list of societal issues aligned with the learning objectives that students will select from, or students have the option of submitting a different societal issue with an explanation of how it aligns with the learning objectives. Next, students will select the product or performance to demonstrate their learning. Students will then create a project plan and submit their plan to receive feedback from the instructor. Students adapt their project plan based on instructor feedback, begin research on the societal issue, and complete the product or performance to demonstrate their learning. Lastly, students present their product or performance asynchronously using a video recording tool like VoiceThread for feedback and grading.

Design-based Learning

Design-based learning (or design thinking) involves creativity, critical thinking, and brainstorming to solve human-centered problems. Design-based learning provides opportunities to collaboratively engage with peers to innovate and determine solutions. The process students use to ideate can vary based on the type of design process you select to use in the course.

One example of design-based learning

• Empathize – students focus on human-centered experiences and learn about their audience.
• Define – students define personas (e.g., who will benefit from the innovation, who will be the end user of the product or service, or who might be the customers to attract), goals, and objectives.
• Ideate – students brainstorm without judgment of ideas.
• Prototype – students develop an outline, sketch, flowchart, model, role-play, etc.
• Test – students implement the prototype and receive feedback (self, peer, and instructor).
• Reflect and redesign – students reflect on their learning process and refine or redesign the prototype.

The focus of design-based learning is to foster students’ ideation, curiosity, openness to new ideas, and comfort with ambiguity. Design-based learning can be implemented in major coursework in design fields like industrial design, environmental, architecture, graphic design, and engineering as well human-centered fields like law, psychology, anthropology, and business.

Example – Design-based Learning

An engineering or architectural instructor decides to incorporate design-based learning activities into scheduled class time. Each design-based learning activity begins with a class discussion of a human-focused problem and personas (people who are impacted by the problem). For example, the instructor shows a picture of a public building and asks students to identify personas who might find the building unaccessible. Students spend time empathizing and defining the personas and goals of their redesign of the entrance. Next, students begin the ideation nonverbally using an asynchronous interactive board ( Padlet , Jamboard , Trello , etc.) during class and then continue to ideate over the next few weeks. In a subsequent class, the instructor guides students through a discussion to determine the top ideas for solving the problem. Each group selects one idea to design and test. Students submit the prototype and reflection on the process for feedback and grading.

Want to learn more about tools that you can use for design-based learning? Please visit the Other EdTech Apps in the EdTech section of the CATE website to review tools, resources, and more.

WHY? Heading link Copy link

Impact of authentic assessments.

Authentic assessments have the potential to improve student self-efficacy (belief in own capacity), performance, and learning.

• Self-efficacy and confidence – in a review of research completed on fifteen studies of project-based learning, 90% of the students reported improved confidence and were optimistic that they could implement project-based learning in future careers (Indrawn, 2019).
• Higher grades – In a general education writing course, students who participated in scenario-based learning showed consistently higher averages (one to two letter grades higher) than students who did not receive scenario-based learning (Golden, 2018).
• Engagement and retention – authentic assessments have shown improved student engagement and learner retention through participation in authentic assessments.
• Direct evidence – authentic assessments provide direct evidence of students’ learning and skills for instructors and students to better understand the learning taking place and plan the next steps for instruction and learning.
• Student diversity – authentic assessments allow students to demonstrate their unique abilities, lived experiences, interests, and social identities.
• Real-world artifacts – authentic assessments provide students with authentic tasks that can be utilized in professional portfolios, resumes, or interviews.

Workforce Readiness and Graduate Attributes Heading link Copy link

Workforce readiness and graduate attributes.

Authentic assessments’ impact has also been viewed through the lens of workforce readiness and graduate attributes. For example, in a project-based learning experience, 78% of students reported that the experience prepared them to be workforce ready because of the real-world practice they received through the authentic assessment (Indrawn, 2019).

Several graduate attributes have been identified as outcomes of authentic assessment participation (Foss, 2021; Indrawn, 2019; Karunanayaka, 2021; Elliott-Kingston, 2018; Murphy, 2017; Rowan, 2012), including:

• Open-mindedness – students who participate in authentic assessments learn to be receptive to the diversity of ideas and multiple perspectives.
• Comfort with ambiguity – students who participate in authentic assessments learn to live with uncomfortableness as they construct new knowledge and meaning.
• Ability to engage in an iterative process – authentic assessments provide students with opportunities to ideate, evaluate, and reflect on ideas and learning. Students develop effective problem-solving skills through this iterative process that includes idea incubation.
• Creativity – authentic assessments positively reinforce students’ creativity through the inquiry process.
• Learn to fail – authentic assessments provide formative feedback to help students build resiliency and strengthen their self-efficacy even when faced with failure.
• Take risks – authentic assessments encourage student risk-taking, and the instructor provides a safe and supportive learning environment for taking risks.
• Search for multiple answers – students learn how to brainstorm ideas and develop numerous solutions to address problems.
• Internally motivated – authentic assessments support students’ internal motivation by providing opportunities for student choice based on their interests and future careers. Students develop metacognition and self-regulation skills as they reflect on their motivations, interests, and learning.
• Take ownership of their learning – authentic assessments foster student ownership and autonomy. Students develop scholarship and a commitment to life-long learning through participation in authentic assessments.
• Leadership – authentic assessments foster leadership, professionalism, and decision-making skills as students self-direct their learning and performance.
• Citizenship and empathy – in many cases, authentic assessments ask students to reflect on an audience, end-user, or global community when solving a problem or designing a product. These experiences help to foster citizenship and empathy.

HOW? Heading link Copy link

Considerations for authentic assessments.

There are several variables that you should consider as you begin to design an authentic assessment: 

• The education and experience level of students – consider how you will support students who may not have the professional skills yet to complete the authentic tasks (see the Student Success during Authentic Assessments in the HOW section of this guide).
• The subjectivity of authenticity – consider how you will ensure that the designed assessment is authentic to the students. Please note that authenticity is subjective in nature; this means that what one person views as authentic might not be regarded the same by another (see the Elements of Authentic Assessments in the WHAT section of this guide for ways to make your assessment more authentic). Will you provide students with an opportunity to give you feedback to improve authenticity? Will you engage with practitioners in the field to ensure the authenticity of scenarios, problems, or prompts?
• Complexity – consider how you will ensure that the assessment’s level of complexity is aligned to the learning objectives, course outcomes, and real-world situation, problem, or field of study.
• Instructor’s role – consider how you will interact with students during the authentic assessment (see the Student Success during Authentic Assessments in the HOW section of this guide). How will you ensure that your role supports the education and experience level of your students? Will you provide guidance, facilitation, or direct instruction during the authentic assessment?
• Student ownership and choice – consider what level of student responsibility and choice that will be present in the authentic assessment. Will students have minimal responsibility if you are using direct instruction, or will the students have higher levels of responsibility if you are guiding student-directed inquiry? Will students have the opportunity to choose how they will demonstrate their learning with a final product or performance?
• Formative feedback – consider how students will receive formative feedback during the authentic assessment. Who will provide the formative feedback (instructor, TA, peers, or self)?
• In large class sizes consider incorporating authentic assessments through partner or group work to reduce grading and feedback time as well as encourage communication and collaboration skills of students.
• In online courses consider incorporating asynchronous peer review to provide opportunities for student interaction and feedback.
• Alignment of assessments and instruction – consider how you will utilize authentic learning instruction to support student achievement in authentic assessments. For example, if using design-based learning during a group assignment then consider utilizing design thinking during your lectures and activities.

Authentic Assessment Products or Performances Heading link Copy link

There are numerous types of products and performances to choose from when designing an authentic assessment. This is not an all-encompassing list of authentic products or performances, but more of a starting point for ideas. Instructors should also consider allowing students or groups to brainstorm ideas for products or performances and self-select a format.

Writing for an Actual Audience

• Action plan
• Analysis – Gap, SWOT, Comparative
• Article for a professional publisher
• Autobiography
• Blog article
• Business report
• Children’s story
• Executive summary
• External document
• Fictional short story
• Historical fiction
• Internal document for communication – memo
• Literary analysis
• Media review
• Outline for meeting, training, or presentation
• Pamphlet or brochure
• Podcast narrative
• Presentation slides and speaker notes
• Research paper
• Short story
• Song lyrics
• Script for presentation, skit, or role playing

Performances

• Conference presentation
• Dance performance
• Demonstration
• Dramatization
• Music performance
• Oral report
• Panel discussion
• Play performance
• Poetry performance
• Presentation
• Recorded interview
• Role playing
• Routine – exercise, cheer, aerobic, gymnastics
• Teaching a skill
• Video presentation

Design of Products

• Drawings or sketches
• Physical model
• Project plan

Creation of Products

• Animation video
• Assessment tool – checklist, rubric
• Dance choreography
• Data display – spreadsheet
• Infographic
• Musical piece
• Photographs
• Questionnaire
• Visuals – chart, graph, Venn diagram

Other Types

• Peer review
• Self-assessments
• Work samples

GETTING STARTED Heading link Copy link

Getting started.

The following steps will support you as you develop an authentic assessment:

• a) What should students know and be able to do?
• b) What are your learning objectives and course outcomes?
• c) Are there disciplinary norms or practices that should be incorporated into the authentic assessment?
• d) Are there transferable skills or workforce readiness skills that should be incorporated into the authentic assessment?
• a) Will the authentic assessment allow students to demonstrate proficiency in the learning objectives as well as develop self-regulation and metacognition skills?
• b) Will the authentic assessment have opportunities for practice and feedback?
• c) Will the authentic assessment collect valid and reliable data to confirm student outcomes?
• a) Authenticity – What elements of the assessment will make it authentic (see Elements of Authentic Assessments in the WHAT section of this guide)?
• b) Format – Will the format be a product or performance? Will the format be student-selected or instructor-selected?
• c) Students’ and instructor’s role – What will be the level of responsibility for student ownership of learning? What forms of guidance and authentic learning will you provide for student support?
• d) Timeline and Progress – What will be the timeline for the authentic assessment? How will progress be monitored by the students and instructor?
• e) Deliverables – What items or elements of the authentic assessment will be graded?
• f) Feedback – What will be the frequency of feedback? Who will provide the feedback? Will there be an opportunity for students to provide feedback to the instructor on their experience?
• g) Grading – What are the grading criteria for this authentic assessment? How will these criteria be explained so that students understand the expectations?
• 4)  The fourth step is to review data collected from the authentic assessment and reflect on the implementation of the authentic assessment to inform continuous improvements for equitable student outcomes.

Want to learn more about assessments? Please visit the other Assessment & Grading Practices teaching guides and the Resources Section of the CATE website to review resources and more. Would you like support in designing an authentic assessment? Consider scheduling an online or in-person instructional design consultation .

Student Success during Authentic Assessments Heading link Copy link

A well-planned and communicated authentic assessment will help improve student performance and student satisfaction during the authentic assessment.

Communication of Authentic Assessments

Consider providing an overview of the authentic assessment that demonstrates alignment to the course and learning objectives, as well as possible disciplinary norms and practices. This overview can also help explain how students’ participation in the authentic assessment will provide them with the opportunity to practice transferable and workforce readiness skills. Additionally, this information can help create buy-in improving student motivation and engagement during the authentic assessment.

Consider creating a timeline of the authentic assessment that includes the following information:

• Start date for authentic assessment
• Due dates for the submission of deliverables
• Dates for formative feedback and progress monitoring
• The final due date for authentic assessment product or performance
• Date for summative feedback and grade

Deliverables

Consider providing a detailed list of the required deliverables for the authentic assessment. For example, if utilizing project-based learning then the deliverables might include:

• The project plan
• Draft(s) of the project with formative feedback
• Completed project
• Presentation of project
• Reflection on process
• Self-assessment of final project and presentation

Expectations and Grading for Authentic Assessments

Grading criteria .

Defining grading criteria is one way to support students’ understanding of expectations during the authentic assessment. Grading criteria refer to what students will do (performance) and what instructors will measure and score. Once you have determined what students will submit for grading (the deliverables) then you can communicate expectations for each deliverable by listing the grading criteria and total points for each criterion.

For example, if utilizing project-based learning then one deliverable might be the project plan. The project plan might be worth 50 points and the grading criteria and total points for each criterion might include:

• Project question or problem – 10 points
• Proposed materials or research – 15 points
• Proposed product or performance – 10 points
• Proposed process of design – 15 points

You might consider taking the grading criteria for a deliverable and expanding on the information by utilizing a rubric . Rubrics can help you describe the varying levels of performance for each grading criterion.

For example, you can describe the criterion: project question or problem (worth ten points) in three levels of performance.

• Proficiency – project question or problem is fully developed and demonstrates a clear alignment to the learning objectives (ten points).
• Developing – project question or problem is adequately developed and demonstrates alignment to the learning objectives (seven points).
• Needs revision – project question or problem isn’t developed enough to support the project and/or is not aligned to the learning objectives. Please revise and resubmit (six or fewer points).

The description of the performance levels will help students understand what the expectations are for each component of the authentic assessment. You can develop a rubric with one, two, three, or more levels of performance. The criterion performance levels can be displayed in Blackboard by utilizing the rubric tool. Want to learn more about rubrics and assessment tools in Blackboard? Please visit the Blackboard Assessments & Grading page in the EdTech section of the CATE website.

Facilitation and Guidance during Authentic Assessments

Facilitation .

Consider the varying levels of student responsibility and instructor facilitation that can be offered during an authentic assessment, examples include:

• Direct instruction – the instructor provides the question or problem, materials, process, or design, as well as directs the analysis and facilitates the drawing of conclusions. This type of instruction provides the most structure, scaffolding (support), and guidance during the authentic assessment.
• Structured authentic assessment – the instructor provides the question or problem, materials, process, or design, but the students direct the analysis with support from the instructor and draw conclusions based on their analysis. This type of instruction allows for students to create new meaning or knowledge while being guided through a structured authentic assessment.
• Guided authentic assessment – the instructor provides the question or problem, and materials and the students determine the process or design, as well as direct the analysis and draw conclusions. This type of instruction allows for student autonomy with an instructor-selected focus on a specific question or problem.
• Student-directed authentic assessment – the instructor provides the learning objectives or course outcomes, and then the students determine the question or problem, materials, process or design, analysis, and conclusions. This type of authentic assessment provides the least amount of structure but can still contain scaffolding and guidance from the instructor through reminders and feedback.

Consider how you will encourage students’ ability to self-direct their learning while providing them with appropriate levels of support and guidance to ensure their success in the authentic assessment.

There are several ways to provide support and guidance to students during an authentic assessment, including:

• Class discussion – add time for authentic assessment discussions around progress, challenges, and achievements.
• Peer review – provide opportunities for students to review their peers’ work and provide feedback.
• Calendar – add the authentic assessment timeline to your course calendar, so that students have due dates and progress monitoring dates.
• Announcements – create reminders using the announcements tool in Blackboard to support student progress monitoring as well as provide students with resources.
• Online office hours – designate specific online office hours for students to drop in to ask questions and get support.
• Resources – provide students with resources, including preferred databases, exemplar authentic assessments, and UIC academic support services.

CITING THIS GUIDE Heading link Copy link

Citing this guide.

Messier, N. (2022). “Authentic Assessments.“ Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence at the University of Illinois Chicago. Retrieved [today’s date] from https://teaching.uic.edu/resources/teaching-guides/assessment-grading-practices/authentic-assessments/

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Heading link Copy link

Articles, websites, and videos, authentic assessments.

• Selkin, P. (2020). Video – Alternative Assessment Strategy for a Physics Final (6:01 minutes)
• University of Liverpool (n.d.). Authentic Assessment – including authentic case studies
• UNSW. (n.d.). Assessing Authentically
• Ashford-Rowe, K. (n.d.). Authentic Assessment Matters .

Inquiry-based learning

• Nutt, D. (2020). Inquiry-based labs give physics students experimental edge. 
• Art of Mathematics. (n.d.). Inquiry-based Learning Guides
• Lesley University. (n.d.). Empowering students: The 5E model explained. 

Problem-based and Scenario-based learning

• WPI. (2021). Video – The Great Problems Seminar (GPS) at WPI (4:20 minutes)
• Harvard Business School. (2020). Video – Take a Seat in the Harvard MBA Case Classroom (9:59 minutes)
• Cornell University. (n.d.). Problem-based Learning
• Lerner College of Medicine. (n.d.). Problem-based Learning

Project-based learning

• WPI. (n.d.). PBL in Higher Education
• WPI. (2018). Transforming Higher Education Through Project-based Learning
• Cult of Pedagogy (2016). Project Based Learning: Start Here
• Buck Institute for Education (n.d.). my PBL works.

Design-based learning (Design Thinking)

• Brown, T. (2009). Video – Designers – think big! (16:34 minutes)
• IDEO (n.d.). Design Thinking for educators.
• IDEO (n.d.). Design Thinking.
• Morris, H., Warman, G. (2015). Using Design Thinking in Higher Education

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Ashford-Rowe, K., Herrington, J., Brown, C. (2014). Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education . 39. 10.1080/02602938.2013.819566.

Berglund, J., Candefjord, S., Gil, J. (2020). Scaffolding activities for project-based learning. 10.13140/RG.2.2.34702.92487.

Eddy, P., Lawrence, A. (2012). Wikis as platforms for authentic assessment. Innovative higher education. 38. 10.1007/s10755-012-9239-7.

Elliott-Kingston, C., Doyle, O.P.E., Hunter, A. (2018). Benefits of scenario-based learning in university education. Acta Horticulturae . DOI:10.17660/ActaHortic.2016.1126.13

Foss, M., Liu, Y. (2021). Developing creativity through project-based learning .

Golden, P. (2018). Conceptualized writing: Promoting audience-centered writing through scenario-based learning . International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Volume 12, Number 1, Article 6.

Grant, K., Fedoruk, L., Nowell, L. (2021). Conversations and reflections on authentic assessment. Imagining SoTL . 1. 146-162. 10.29173/isotl532.

Gulikers, J.T.M., Bastiaens, T.J., Kirschner, P.A. (2004). A five-dimensional framework for authentic assessment. ETR&D 52, 67 (2004).

Indrawan, E., Jalinus, N., Syahril, S. (2019). Review project-based learning. International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR). 8. 1014 – 1018.

Karunanayaka, S., Naidu, S. (2021). Impacts of Authentic Assessment on the Development of Graduate Attributes. Distance Education . 42. 10.1080/01587919.2021.1920206.

Lane, J. (2019). Inquiry-based learning . Penn State University. Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence.

Lippmann M. (2022) Inquiry-based learning in psychology. In: Zumbach J., Bernstein D., Narciss S., Marsico G. (eds) International handbook of psychology learning and teaching . Springer https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26248-8_59-2

Murphy, V., Fox, J., Freeman, S., Hughes, N. (2017). “Keeping It Real”: A review of the benefits, challenges and steps towards implementing authentic assessment . The All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (AISHE-J). 9.

Nundy S., Kakar A., Bhutta Z.A. (2022.) The why and how of problem-based learning? How to practice academic medicine and publish from developing countries? Springer, Singapore.

Nutt, D. (2020). Inquiry-based labs give physics students experimental edge.

Rowan, B. (2014). Academic portfolios, holistic learning, and student success in higher education. US-China Education Review A. 4. 637-645.

Sutadji, E., Susilo, H., Wibawa, A.P., Jabari, N.A.M., Rohmad, S.N. (2021). Authentic assessment implementation in natural and social science . Educ. Sci. 2021, 11, 534.

Thomsen, B.C. & Renaud, C., Savory, S., Romans, E.J., Mitrofanov, O., Rio, M., Day, S., Kenyon, A., Mitchell, J. (2010). Introducing scenario-based learning: Experiences from an undergraduate electronic and electrical engineering course. 953 – 958. 10.1109/EDUCON.2010.5492474.

Wilson-Mah, R. (2019). A study of authentic assessment in an internship course.

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Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment is a term, coined in part by  Grant Wiggins , for assessments that are tightly aligned with the learning objectives of a course or learning experience and have learners working on “real world” problems. Authentic assessments usually have more than one “correct” answer but can be evaluated using a rubric that provides assurance that the data obtained from the assessment is valid.

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 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 )
• When grading, use a rubric that keeps the grader’s focus on the most important standards you want learners to meet. 
• SEAS-  Michigan sustainability cases
• Indiana University –  Authentic assessments
• University of Buffalo –  National center for case study teaching in science: Case types & methods
• Columbia University –  Case consortium
• Wiggins, G. (1989).  A true test: Toward more authentic and equitable assessment . The Phi Delta Kappan, 70(9), 703-713. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from  www.jstor.org/stable/20404004
• Wiggins, G. (1990).  The case for authentic assessment . Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, 2(2). Retrieved May 18, 2020, from  https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol2/iss1/2   

Citation: Assessment Strategies. Kennesaw State University. Retrieved June 12, 2023 from https://dli.kennesaw.edu/resources/pedagogyforonlineteaching/assessment_strategies.php.

This teaching guide, which has been modified from its original form, is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

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When considering how to assess student learning in a course, most instructors would agree that the ideal assessment would be one that not only assesses students’ learning; it also teaches students and improves their skills and understanding of course content. One fundamental aspect of such assessments is that they are  authentic .

An authentic assignment is one that requires application of what students have learned to a new situation, and that demands judgment to determine what information and skills are relevant and how they should be used. Authentic assignments often focus on messy, complex real-world situations and their accompanying constraints; they can involve a real-world audience of stakeholders or “clients” as well. According to Grant Wiggins (1998), an assignment is authentic if it

• is realistic.
• requires judgment and innovation.
• asks the student to “do” the subject.
• replicates or simulates the contexts in which adults are “tested” in the workplace or in civic or personal life.
• assesses the student’s ability to efficiently and effectively use a repertoire of knowledge and skills to negotiate a complex task.
• allows appropriate opportunities to rehearse, practice, consult resources, and get feedback on and refine performances and products.

Authentic assessments can be contrasted with conventional test questions, which are often indirect measures of a student’s ability to apply the knowledge and skills gained in a course. Conventional tests have an important place in college courses, but cannot take the place of authentic assessments. The table below, drawn from Wiggins, illustrates the differences between typical tests and authentic assessments.

Authentic assessments have several advantages over conventional tests. They are likely to be more valid than conventional tests, particularly for learning outcomes that require higher-order thinking skills. Because they involve real-world tasks, they are also likely to be more interesting for students, and thus more motivating. And finally, they can provide more specific and usable information about what students have succeeded in learning as well as what they have not learned.

However, authentic assessments may require more time and effort on an instructor’s part to develop, and may be more difficult to grade. To address the difficulty of grading authentic assessments, it is often useful to create a grading rubric that specifies the traits that will be evaluated and the criteria by which they will be judged. (For more information, see  the CITL resource on rubrics .)

Examples of Authentic Assessments

Who is doing this at iu bloomington:.

Professor Joshua Danish, in the School of Education, asks his students to apply the cognitive theories they have learned in class to help them interpret children’s behaviors in the classrooms they are observing, in  this faculty spotlight .

Professor Alwiya Omar, Clinical Professor of Linguistics and director of IUB’s Swahili Flagship Program, has her students learn Swahili by engaging in an activity with strong roots in African languages and cultures: storytelling. She describes her approach in  this faculty spotlight .

Wiggins, Grant. (1998). Ensuring authentic performance. Chapter 2 in  Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 21 – 42.

For more help or information

To get help in designing authentic assessments,  contact CITL  to meet with a consultant.

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Applied Pedagogies for Higher Education pp 323–341 Cite as

Real World Learning and Authentic Assessment

• Melenie Archer 3 ,
• Dawn A. Morley 4 &
• Jean-Baptiste R. G. Souppez 5  
• Open Access
• First Online: 06 November 2020

7077 Accesses

1 Citations

Archer, Morley and Souppez critique the value of building authentic assessment to reflect better a real world learning approach that prepares students more explicitly for employment after graduation. The two case studies within this chapter are drawn from the different disciplines of festival and event management and yacht design; both aim to prepare students for their respective industries from the onset of their degree programmes. The case studies present how the use of well-managed pedagogic strategies, such as peer review and assessment, reflective practice and the use of formative feedback, can prepare students successfully for authentic and high-risk summative assessments. The authors argue for a learning and teaching approach that emphasises sequential, real world assessment that focuses on student longitudinal development.

Case studies: Melenie Archer and Jean-Baptiste R. G. Souppez.

Download chapter PDF

Introduction

As students increasingly adopt a consumerist lifestyle academics are under pressure to assess and mark more students’ assignments in quicker turn around periods. In no other area is the marketisation shift between student and academic more apparent in the accountability that academics now need to demonstrate to students in their grading and feedback (Boud & Molloy, 2013 ). When evaluating their higher education experience students are most likely to complain about their grading or feedback (Boud & Molloy, 2013 ) and National Student Survey results consistently indicate that this category, more than any other, has the highest student dissatisfaction rates (Race, 2014 ).

Real world learning (RWL) encourages the development of student attributes for employment and lifelong learning. Over recent years the ethos in higher education has started to move towards a real world learning approach and student-led curriculum where a socio-constructivist positioning of students’ learning invites students to be active partners in their higher education experience. The increasing incidence of group assessment and peer review is indicative of this change and traditional methods of marking have also been touched by this changing ethos (Nicol, Thomson, & Breslin, 2014 ). Students are encouraged to lessen their dependency and increase their pro activity in negotiating and building their academic and personal journey through higher education (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006 ). Feedback has started to be positively repositioned as feed forward where students are encouraged to build on feedback for future development.

The recognition that academics need to be smarter about the time they spend marking (Race, 2014 ) supports a re-examination of assessment and feedback especially as traditional written feedback encourages passivity in students rather than a personal hunger to feed forward their learning into future development. It makes sense that academics step out of present practice to embrace assessment that actively engages students not only with their learning but the means to use feedback constructively for future learning and employability.

What Is Real World Learning and How Does It Relate to Assessment?

This concept map was produced during a session to identify what RWL is and where it fits into higher education teaching and assessment frameworks (Fig. 14.1 ). The map explores the learning outcomes in relation to employability, understanding of the industry sector and identifies the opportunities for personal development and self-awareness. Recognising RWL as an authentic assessment experience, which can be personalised to create challenging and unique learning, the concept map also ascertains that formative and group peer review and assessment will allow students to develop personal traits such as resilience, reflection and team working.

Concept map from the authors

Designing Authentic Assessment

Real world learning requires student assessment to replicate as close as possible the authenticity of real world experiences. Gulikers, Bastiaens and Kirschner ( 2004 ) in their examination of STEM subjects present the idea that authentic assessment requires students to use the same competencies, or combinations of knowledge, skills and attitudes that are applied in the criterion situated in professional life. The assessment criteria may necessarily differ according to the discipline area and Shulman ( 2005 ) argues that educators should try to develop signature pedagogies that link not only to ideas, practices and values, but also the behaviours adopted in inherent uncertainty. Authentic assessment may involve increased challenge and risk that initiate student affective engagement and reflection on the consequences of the decisions made. Traditional assessment, dominated by examinations and essays, risks creating a schism between theory and practice while assessment remains dominated by academic procedure. Carefully designed assessment, that enhances work readiness as well as measuring learning, encourages a bridging of university learning and its practical application (Morley, Bettles, & Derham, 2019 ).

The case studies, presented in this chapter, are drawn from the different disciplines of yacht design and festival management. They are good examples of the differing signature pedagogies that Shulman ( 2005 ) presents; both courses require different pedagogies to suit each discipline.

In order to ensure assessment and feedback are relevant to RWL, practitioners must decide on the desired outcomes for the course. From the outset the module must fit with the title of the course. The BA (Hons) Yacht Design course focuses on the technical elements of the design process and the assessment would not be solely based on the model boat race, as described in the case study, but also based on other simulated and controlled environments that prepare students for working within the yachting industry. In contrast, the BA (Hons) Festival and Event Management course assessments focus on the management competencies required during the delivery stage of an event. This is assessed through tutor observation and peer assessment reflecting real world practice and decision making. Both courses require students to demonstrate how they would perform, act and react in a work environment thus providing the student with an enriched learning experience relevant and beneficial to their chosen career path.

Kolb ( 1984 ), Honey and Mumford and Lewin have all linked theory to practice when decoding the experiential learning process, presenting a cyclical method (Beard & Wilson, 2006 ). The design of this approach allows for reflection on experience during the formative feedback stages; however, the use of the model may not always be applicable in the summative stages of assessment when the physical action is the end product. Assessment design and timing should, therefore, be considered if the student is to benefit from the formative feedback experience in the RWL environment.

Academics must consider if there are enough steps in the assessment process to assist the delivery of an RWL programme—to build in reflective elements and to establish if these actually meet the learning criteria. As a result of trying to make learning explicit and ‘usable’ for students, courses may need extra formative assessments, formal or informal, to give the students the best chance of performing to their best ability during a ‘live’ assessment through the feed forward gained en route.

The importance of dialogue is key to shifting feedback away from the notion of telling to students playing an active role in using the information presented to them. Hounsell ( 2008 ) reinforces the need for sustainability in feedback where feedback moves from the short-term gain to becoming embedded in the students’ understanding of what constitutes acceptable work and within a framework, what needs improving. This can then be transferred to the world of work where students can engage meaningfully in their lifelong learning.

Group meetings, one-to-one support and online surveys are currently used to monitor students’ progress throughout a course to give feedback on predicted academic outcomes. This would be an ideal opportunity to give the student time to reflect on how they will behave in the real world assessment by adding simulated tasks or problem-based activities, so the mid-term progress meetings would subsequently focus on academic and personal development in relation to the real world environment.

The use of Kolb’s experiential learning cycle ( 1984 ) helps to counteract another challenge of using RWL assessment in that all student learning is not always accounted for in the specified learning outcomes of the teaching session. Assessment of experience, particularly in the disciplines of art and performance, is an example of these invisible learning outcomes. Described by De Bono ( 1976 ), logical and analytical thinking demonstrated and practised throughout the study process also interact with ‘lateral’ thinking or ‘out of the box thinking’ (Bladen & Kennell, 2014 ). Often the explicit and invisible learning is so inextricably linked that a physical action that they may cause an emotional reaction therefore affecting the outcome of the assessment. Students may behave differently during a simulation assessment, whereby the emotional effects of working under pressure or creative problem solving may impact student performance. However, the student responses to stress, group conflict or problems are skills essential in the workplace, and the individual’s attitude and approach to learning should be considered in the assessment process. This authentic learning experience creates very personal outcomes for the student, and the use of formative feedback, coaching and peer assessment can provide an enriched learning experience.

Designing Real World Assessment

Peer review as assessment of real world learning.

The process of peer review had been defined as the process by which students give feedback on their peers and receive feedback from their peers (Nicol et al., 2014 ). Peer review will contribute to the formative feedback process by allowing students the opportunity to rate performance and reflect on a formative assessment ahead of the summative task. Peer assessment is the process by which students can grade each other as part of the final assessment. Both stages of the use of peer grading could be designed as a simple comparison of work whereby students grade as if they were the tutor or a more complex approach with set criteria and weightings on the results. Peer assessment allows for discussion and reflection on the assessment and is an important tool where the assessment may be an event or simulation. Evidence of contribution during group work can also be assessed using peer assessment, enabling the students to recognise where they fit into the group dynamic and how others view their work. The positive effect of this approach to learning is that the students contribute to the assessment and feedback process establishing ownership and a deeper understanding of their learning journey. Nicol et al. ( 2014 ) discuss using peer review to close the gap between feedback and assessment, allowing students an element of control and autonomy over their own learning and deepening student understanding of how to succeed in the summative assessment.

Case Study 1 is an example of how peer review and assessment can support the students to develop the invisible outcomes associated with experiential learning. Bladen and Kennell’s ( 2014 ) ‘out of the box’ thinking is assessed with criteria such as attitude and leadership skills during the assessment cycle.

Case Study 1

Live Event Assessment (Melenie Archer, Lecturer Festival and Event Management. Solent University, UK)

Students on the BA (Hons) Festival and Event Management course are required to fill out a group peer assessment at both the formative and summative stages of assessment and case study 1 explains this process in more detail. Students are also asked to grade themselves as part of this process, the peer assessment criteria are:

Ideas and suggestions

Leadership and administration of group

Event logistics (e.g. risk management and crowd management)

Staging (e.g. theming, décor and special effects)

Customer care (e.g. appearance, name badge and attitude)

Solent University Festival and Events students are required to host two live events at levels 4 and 5 to demonstrate their understanding of the specific industry disciplines during their three-year BA (Hons) course. When starting the academic year students are asked to choose an event team of up to eight students to work with for the duration of the unit, simulating working in an event or festival team in the workplace. It is recognised that group work poses its own problems in an academic setting, some students will want more control of their grades and prefer individual assessment and others may rely on their group to achieve their best work. For this reason, the core assessment is broken into three elements per year, the event manual (group work), the live event (group work) and a reflective essay (individual). This assessment format is the same for both the live event units, allowing the students to build a deeper level of knowledge by using the skills and theory learned in level 4 and applying them to level 5. This gives the students a clear understanding of expectations at each level and develops more a complex approach to problem solving as the course progresses.

In level 4 the students are given the opportunity to run a practice event before their assessed live event, this takes place in the classroom as it is a low-risk environment allowing students to concentrate on the very basics of running an event. Students host the event for the rest of the class and have sole responsibility for the theme, style and format of the event. Due to the safe environment student’s focus on making the event fun and engaging, and the formative assessment is an enjoyable experience for all involved. Students understand that this practice event is part of the formative assessment process and are supported to try new concepts and develop practical skills they have not had experience of previously. The formative assessment is very much a nurturing process where students are given verbal, written and peer feedback timed a few months before the final live event assessment to give students time to reflect and adapt.

The first ‘real’ assessment is the event manual where students must divide the workload to produce one piece of group work which is graded by the tutor, and the group is given a collective grade mark. As the whole group has contributed to the project the students are given the opportunity to award their peers individual grades based on five criteria, ideas and suggestions, leadership and administration, event logistics, staging and customer care. The final grade is a 50% split contribution between the tutor and the student peer assessed grade. The tutor has the authority to override an unbalanced peer grade if they think the decision is not based on academic effort.

When the final event manual grades are released, students are told the grade the tutor initially awarded and their final peer assessed grade. This gives the students a balanced indication of how well they did according to the tutor (the client) and their peers (workmates). Often this is not taken well, and one-to-one tutorials are offered to support students who did not do as well as they thought or who may feel they have to justify their performance to the tutor.

Introducing peer assessment to the students from the very beginning gives them the opportunity to reflect and improve on their performance by using it as a formative assessment tool. By the time the second part of the assessment, the live event, comes around the students are well aware of their tutor expectations as well as what their event group expect from them.

Annie (anonymised) underperformed in her first year, she rarely attended seminars and group meetings and her contribution to group work in all her level 4 units was poor. She received a lower score to her peers in her first-year core unit and blamed everyone else in her reflective essay. At this stage of Annie’s learning she was not ready to acknowledge that she was responsible for her own learning and performance. Annie passed the first year and returned still blaming the rest of her previous group for her poor grades. It was only when the class were asked to choose their event groups for the second year that Annie started to realise the effect this would have when in seminar time the whole class had chosen their groups and Annie sat on her own group less. The tutor intervened and both groups said they did not want her in the group due to her reputation for freeloading in group work. Annie had to make a case to each group as to why they should give her another chance and she was made to sign a group contract. Annie over delivered to all parts of the group work as she realised that it was her own attitude to learning that was holding her back. Annie graduated with a 2:1 in 2018.

Peer assessment is successful on this course as it opens a dialogue on individual and group performance between the student and tutor, reflecting the world of work and the structure of the festival and event industry.

When grading themselves for the first time, students will often inflate their own grade overestimating their contribution to group work. Falchikov ( 2005 ) argues that in the peer assessment process there will always be an element of over and under rating of peer performance; this can be monitored through the formative feedback process. As in Case Study 1 , the student was not aware of her own shortcomings and when evaluating the assessment in a reflective essay still believed that the rest of the group were to blame. In this instance, the formative feedback did not have an instant effect on Annie’s behaviour as she needed more proof that her own behaviour and approach to the task was the problem, triggering an emotional response to the situation. Beard and Wilson ( 2006 ) confirm the significance of emotions in student engagement and response to learning. The feed forward process resulted in a positive outcome in this instance by allowing the student time to reflect on her actions, increasing awareness of self.

Boud and Molloy ( 2013 ) comment that the use of self and peer assessment seemed to accentuate students’ critical processes and their ability to make judgements about their work. Both self and peer assessments were predominantly given in ‘real time’ with no delay to feedback and at best required some facilitation by the academic through, for example, an assessment handout for students to structure their responses. This sort of academic intervention addresses Carless’ ( 2008 ) concerns that an element of trust and credibility needs to be built between peers if peer assessment is to be successful and for educationalists to work in a climate where review is valued, where they can share practice which is both celebrated as well as requiring change.

This self-reflection process is in contrast to the students participating in the BEng (Hons) Yacht and Powercraft Design and the BEng (Hons) Yacht Design and production. In Case Study 2 the students are given a clear end goal, to be the winner of the model yacht race. Students on these courses learn in a simulated environment throughout the year, outside of the traditional classroom set up. The students receive formative feedback throughout the learning journey, as described by Hattie and Timperley ( 2007 ) as a feed forward process.

Case Study 2

Model Yacht Assessment (Jean Baptiste Souppez, Senior Lecturer in Yacht Design and Composite Engineering, Solent University, UK)

The first year of a degree typically covers all the underpinning knowledge on which the rest of the course will be built but is often not appreciated as such by the students, overwhelmed with theory and missing on the practical applications. Consequently, it is vital to provide a real world and tangible learning outcomes, involving decision making and unique choices, in the form of an engaging assessment. To demonstrate the practical applications of all the knowledge and skills acquired in the first year of the BEng (Hons) Yacht and Powercraft Design and BEng (Hons) Yacht Design and Production at Solent University, students compete in a model yacht design, build and race.

In this piece of coursework, students are issued a design rule and are tasked with entirely designing their 70 cm long, 1.8 m tall model boats, building them and eventually racing them, making numerous informed decisions driven by their acquired theoretical understanding of naval architecture along the way. The race itself takes place in the very last week of the year and as such is a nice social event to showcase the student’s achievements; nonetheless, the ranking is worth 20% of the assessment: the winner scoring full marks, and the sinkers none! Anecdotally, one’s victory in the model yacht race is considered a terrific achievement, owning to prestigious yacht designers having won this particular event, and in one instance, one’s victory was mentioned over 20 years later when being awarded an honorary PhD.

Throughout the academic year, this particular unit is focussed on building towards this final assessment and inherent deliverables and thus is structured in a manner that supports the students in successfully reaching the model yacht assessment. Firstly, the unit is only taught in seminar session, where students have a dedicated work station and work on an individual task. This allows the lecturer to assist and support each student individually, thus creating a more learner-centred environment, with room for personalised advice and practice.

Secondly, blended learning is utilised as part of the unit when looking at the use of specialist software, by either utilising existing online courses ( Lynda.com ) and videos tutorials made in-house. The students can therefore follow those at home, with the seminars being focussed on the practical application of the knowledge gained. With each session having a clear objective in the bigger picture of the overall coursework, a patchwork assessment style is adopted, keeping the students on track while providing ample opportunities to make their own design decisions.

Feedback is conceptualised by Hattie and Timperley ( 2007 ) who imply that the feedback is a consequence of a performance, and therefore comes too late to allow the learner to make the necessary progresses. This led to the feed forward concept which, coupled with formative assessments, will provide students with the valuable support they need in prevision of the summative assessment. This is the rationale behind the unit’s structure: each summative assessment occurs after a similar formative one has been undertaken, with formative feedback given and opportunities for self-assessment and reflection, allowing the students to assess their own performance and critically evaluate changes to be made for the summative one. This strategy has proven to significantly reduce the pressure of the assessment and build student confidence. Eventually, the race also provides students with more than just the final assessor’s comments, but a physical realisation of how their model boat compares to the rest of the class.

Lastly, the unit aims to build a skill set that will support a final tangible outcome: in this instance, the design, build and race of a model yacht. This represents a perfect example of an authentic learning activity, as defined by Ashford-Rowe, Herrington and Brown ( 2013 ), and a tremendous tool to boost engagement, but also motivates the students to achieve their best, and materialise their skills into designing and building their first yacht. The physical nature of the deliverable and the friendly, yet competitive, peer pressure of the race allows to build up the knowledge throughout the year with the model yacht as a clear objective. Furthermore, the highly social nature of the construction and race has proven a key strategy to ensure a strong cohesion across the cohort, building trust but also introducing peer mentoring. Indeed, as all students face similar challenges in the process, they will naturally support each other.

Over the decades, the model yacht assessment has become a flagship assessment of the Yacht Engineering courses at Solent University thanks to its real world nature, providing the students with a clear learning journey, building towards a physical assessment that is engaging, challenging and fun and draws together the whole of the first year’s theory into the first yacht of their career as naval architects.

Use for Formative Feedback and Assessment to Enhance Real World Learning

Boud and Molloy ( 2013 , p. 704) applaud “an approach to feedback that not only respects students’ agency in their own processes of learning but can develop the dispositions needed for identifying and using feedback beyond formal educational structures”. A student must be able to translate academic feedback into a form that is meaningful to themselves so that it can subsequently be used (Nicol, 2009 ). Feed forward provides a valuable alternative strategy to assessment and feedback for the emphasis is placed on active student engagement in the use of their feedback to encourage their own self-regulation (Murtagh & Baker, 2009 ). This has important potential benefits to students’ learning and academics’ time trying to support it.

The very nature of the assessment simulates the real work environment, and, in this instance, there is a tangible outcome. The exposure of students to learning within simulated environments where the feed forward activity contributed to the ongoing development of students’ familiarity, and therefore their professional identity, within that setting. Any opportunity that allows students to learn and be critiqued by experts potentially adds to what Polanyi ( 1966 ) identifies as students’ learning through the tacit dimension of learning found to contribute to students’ fluency and criticality of their performance in practice (Benner, 1984 ).

The use of feed forward, in familiarising students with potentially complex environments that they will have to perform in a professional role in the future, embeds tacit knowledge into students’ learning for future recall and builds confidence for the world of work, as long as the educationalist can articulate, against specific criteria, exactly how the student can improve.

Students are supported to achieve with constant and structured formative feedback, where the students are set online learning to complete at home and feedback and guidance are delivered through timetable tutorial and seminar classes. Students are given the framework and structure of the content of sessions therefore giving them the ownership and agency to develop themselves combining partnership working, coaching and mentorship.

The concept of an assessment being a competition as a standalone measurement of student learning would be neither fair nor productive; however, the feed forward structure of this course enables the students to develop their reflective practice in this learner-centred environment. The idea of winning and losing as an assessment replicates the risks involved within the industry, and to give students the opportunity to practise managing risk gives this assessment value and purpose. Shulman ( 2005 ) identifies that without a certain amount of anxiety and risk, there are limits to how much learning occurs. As a result of the structure of the assessment, overcoming hazards and dealing with unplanned situations heighten the students’ sense of achievement and passion for their subject, and the excitement on race day embeds RWL in the process of making assessments fun, meaningful and memorable.

Taking a more active stance in their learning requires students to be tutored in new processes and attitudes that extend to students taking a more active role in their assessments (Boud & Molloy 2013 ). Academics themselves therefore need to be cognisant of a wider range of assessment methods and design, as well as their own personal practice that will encourage students to actively learn from previous performance. Boud and Molloy ( 2013 ) reinforce that the majority of publications on feedback in higher and professional education concentrate on the micro-skills of the educator in feedback. Whilst all teaching staff bring their own personal style to the giving of feedback, Carless, Salter, Yang and Lam ( 2011 , p. 2) view feedback as a much wider skill set and offer characteristics of sustainable feedback that involve the student in the process of learning from the feedback given:

Involve students in dialogues about learning which raise their awareness of quality performance

Facilitating feedback processes through which students are stimulated to develop capacities in monitoring and evaluating their own learning

Enhancing student capacities for ongoing lifelong learning by student development of skills for goal setting and planning their learning

Designing assessment tasks to facilitate student engagement over time in which feedback from varied sources is generated, processed and used to enhance performance.

The literature therefore highlights two ways that students may use feed forward in their work. The first is a focused version of feed forward when the formative assessment shapes and drives the performance of students towards the summative assessment (Sadler, 1989 ; Hounsell, 2008 ). The second offers a broader interpretation of Carless et al.’s ( 2011 ) characteristics of sustainable feedback when a longitudinal view on student feed forward is used outside the specific boundaries of the formative-summative continuum for ongoing self-development. In other words, the feedback is used beyond the assignment for the development of future academic or professional skills. If students can attain self-regulation skills (Murtagh & Baker, 2009 ) through real world learning pedagogy, that allow them to interpret their feedback, these skills will work for them across courses and longitudinally during their academic careers.

The feed forward method gives the student the opportunity to reflect and grow both academically and emotionally, and the concept of a two-step assessment approach allows for a second chance approach to achieving the final grade mark, Sambell, McDowell and Montgomery ( 2013 ) describe the process as opening up a space where students can learn through failure and be supported to develop. Students do not always respond well to group assessment feedback and may seek to blame others when group work fails, as emphasis is often placed on individual academic achievement within an assessment framework (Boud & Hawke, 2004 ). By receiving detailed formative feedback from peer and tutors, the student can process and understand in more depth what they need to do in order to succeed, as this dual approach to feedback will also mimic the workplace.

To get the most positive results from this process, the assessment criteria must be transparent from the outset; students need to understand what it is exactly that they are being assessed on and, just as importantly, what they will not be graded on. For instance, simulated assessed tasks can involve pressurised scenarios with the added challenges associated with observation assessments. There may not be a physical product produced during the course of the assessment therefore tutors must establish and communicate to students what success looks like. How invisible outcomes can be assessed, such as, atmosphere and enjoyment must be communicated to the students and the complexity of the nature of the assessment will require an increased amount of coaching and mentoring. Again, the use of formative peer and tutor assessments will give the individual student a greater comprehension of how to succeed and what they will need to deliver in the summative assessment. To avoid marking students on personality traits or emotional response, and for formative feedback to be fair and constant, it must be based on the criteria the tutor has co-constructed with the class.

Formative assessment and feedback deepen students’ understanding of the assessment particularly when the assessment criteria are complex and have the potential for the outcomes to be influenced by individual or group physical and emotional responses to a task. It was felt that common complaints of students only focusing on assessment-driven learning (Koen, Bitzer, & Beets, 2012 ) could start to be addressed if a balance was taken between two forms of feed forward when it was specifically placed within modules of learning as a formative activity as well as being used as a wider ethos for students’ self-development.

Assessment emphasis on long-term development is currently at odds with the immediate approach to assessment and feedback to which students and universities have become accustomed. This chapter argues that academics designing learning programmes can identify the twin components of peer and formative review as a means of developing real world and unique assessment methods. Embedding practice and theory together are essential elements of RWL and authentic assessment.

It is also recommended that real world learning assessment needs to incorporate reflection as part of the formative or summative assessment. If reflection is not at a formative stage, students should go through the assessment cycle with reflection at the end. This can be addressed by inserting a ‘What if?’ stage which could be adopted into the assessment framework. A formative sample of ‘what if?’ scenarios would challenge the students to address the potential pitfalls of the summative assessment task and their personal and professional response to problems. For example, students in the BA (Hons) Festival and Event Management course could be presented with ‘What if?’ situations such as ‘the venue cancels the day of your event’ or ‘adverse weather conditions affects staff transport to the venue’ to prepare them for the Real World Assessment. Student reflection has to be part of authentic assessment whether implicitly or explicitly and course design and structure are key to the RWL framework.

The case studies present examples of development and sequential assessment, the use of other assessors other than the academic and an increasing co-constructive element between student and academic as described by Boud and Soler ( 2016 ). Consensus understanding by the teaching staff and the student of the meaning of assessment standards and their application and interpretation are an essential element to this co-constructive responsibility for feed forward. Student literacy needs to be supported by “meta-dialogues [to] discuss processes and strategies for assessment and feedback rather than the specifics of a particular piece of work” (Carless & Boud, 2018 , p. 8).

Complaints as to the sometimes subjective nature of marking and grading of assignments will only be mitigated against if academic staff can articulate the strengths and limitations of any one assignment and in particular to express themselves well in identifying the way forward for students. The underlying ethos of Duncan, Prowse, Wakeman and Harrison ( 2003/2004 ) project could be built upon and named members of academic teams assist students to collate the essence of the feed forward recommendations and help the students to plan these into their next year’s study. In this way, feed forward could be built into undergraduate courses early on rather than students arriving at it by chance or by the preference of individual academics.

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Archer, M., Morley, D.A., Souppez, JB.R.G. (2021). Real World Learning and Authentic Assessment. In: Morley, D.A., Jamil, M.G. (eds) Applied Pedagogies for Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46951-1_14

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Authentic Assessment in the Online Classroom

Assessment isn’t just important from a student perspective. With the online marketplace becoming increasingly crowded, it’s critical that institutions ensure they are offering the courses and experiences that students are looking for.

In their survey of more than 1,500 past, present, and prospective online college students, Magda and Aslanian (2018) found that 74% of online college students are pursuing their program for career-focused reasons, such as transitioning to a new career, updating the skills required for their current job, increasing wages, or meeting employers’ requirements.

Because the majority of online students are career-focused, courses and degree programs must provide those ties to the real world for institutions to stand out in the online landscape. Given its importance to the online classroom, assessment can be a great starting point for integrating this type of relevance into your course.

Authentic assessment is the idea of using creative learning experiences to test students’ skills and knowledge in realistic situations. Authentic assessment measures students’ success in a way that’s relevant to the skills required of them once they’ve finished your course or degree program. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits and challenges of this type of assessment and how you can incorporate authentic assessment in your online course.

What Is Authentic Assessment?

• It’s realistic.
• It requires judgement and innovation.
• It asks the student to “do” the subject.
• It replicates or simulates the contexts in which adults are “tested” in the workplace, in civic life, and in personal life.
• It assesses the student’s ability to efficiently and effectively use a repertoire of knowledge and skill to negotiate a complex task.
• It allows appropriate opportunities to rehearse, practice, consult resources, and get feedback on and refine performances and products.

Simply put, an authentic assessment is one that requires students to apply what they’ve learned in a new, complex circumstance or situation. Typically, this can take one of two forms: real-world assessments that require students to engage in actual situations in their field, or realistic assessments that are relevant in nature but have students engage in situations that mimic the real world (e.g., a case study).

Regardless of the type, authentic assessment is often coupled with opportunities for rehearsal and/or practice. Authentic assessments are often scaffolded throughout a course and allow the instructor to provide feedback that students can then implement in subsequent drafts. Unlike traditional assessments (such as essays and multiple-choice exams), authentic assessments ask students to engage in scenarios or practices that are complex, realistic, and sometimes messy.

Benefits of Authentic Assessment

Notably, authentic assessment breaks the traditional paradigm of multiple-choice or automatically scoring tests and quizzes, which can lead students to believe that learning means staying up all night and cramming to memorize terms or expected answers. Instead, authentic assessments tend to be more student centered, as they ask students to demonstrate their learning through hands-on activities. Rather than asking students to memorize and recall facts, authentic assessments ask students to actively participate in situations that require them to apply the principles they’ve learned about in the instructional material. Thus, learning isn’t about recalling; it’s about performing, which, ideally, will motivate students to engage in the course and succeed in their endeavors.

Drawbacks of Authentic Assessment

As beneficial as authentic assessments can be, they do present challenges as well. First and foremost, authentic assessments require more time for both students and instructors than traditional assessments. For students, authentic assessments typically take longer to complete than an average quiz or test. Because these types of assessments are task based, they might be scaffolded over a number of modules or some other period of time. In addition, students might be more accustomed to traditional assessment, meaning that despite the advantages we’ve discussed, they might need some time to adjust to this new method.

For instructors, time is also of concern. Developing an authentic assessment can be an intense experience that requires course writers to identify and/or research relevant tasks, ensure that those tasks are applicable to students in different areas, and align those tasks with learning objectives and instructional materials. Also, given that students in online courses tend to be in a variety of geographic locations, it can be difficult to build an authentic assessment that’s relevant to everyone. This challenge can vary by discipline, but it’s important for course writers to remember that their students can be from anywhere.

In addition, unlike many traditional assessments, grading an authentic assessment is largely subjective. Because these types of assessments typically address more complex levels of learning, grading will likely take much longer. Authentic assessments typically require detailed, personalized, and specific feedback, meaning that, as beneficial as they can be for students and your course, they will require additional time to design and implement.

How to Develop an Authentic Assessment

Now that we’ve explored the benefits and drawbacks of authentic assessment and looked at a handful of examples, let’s move on to the steps involved in designing one. The following steps, based on those developed by the University of Florida’s Center for Instructional Technology and Training (2018), can help set you on your way toward developing an authentic assessment that addresses your learning objectives, enhances your course, and meets your students’ needs.

Identify Learning Objectives

In most instances, you’ll want to focus on a macro objective—that is, an objective that illustrates what students will be able to do by the conclusion of the course. In a traditional setting, a final exam might be the assessment for a macro objective.

When you look at your objectives, it’s also important to keep relevance in mind. After all, one of the major benefits of an authentic assessment is how it allows students to engage in a relevant or new environment, so you’ll want to make sure that your learning objectives lend themselves to that type of activity. If your learning objectives are already measurable and student centered, though, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Define Relevant Tasks

After identifying the learning objective(s) you’re looking to measure through your authentic assessment, you can then start defining what students will actually do. Given that the assessment should be, well, authentic, start by looking at what professionals in your field do on a daily basis and how those tasks might relate to your selected learning objective. Although your task doesn’t ultimately have to relate to your field, it should require students to apply themselves in a relevant and new situation. Ultimately, the relevance of your assessment to students’ lives and/or goals should be clear. In fact, it’s helpful to state the relevance explicitly at the outset of the assessment.

If you’re struggling to identify a relevant task, consider starting with the verb of your learning objective. Oftentimes, you’ll find that you’re able to define your task by looking at what the objective asks students to do. For instance, if the objective for a business course is that students will be able to analyze the local and global impact of organizational decisions, consider creating a fictional scenario in which students have to make organizational decisions for a business and analyze the impact of those decisions. Looking at your objective’s verb also ensures that your assessment aligns with your learning objective, which is a pillar of effective course design.

Identify Essential Performance Criteria

If the previous step was to define what students will do to complete your authentic assessment, this step focuses on how you’ll know whether they’ve done it well. After all, just because an authentic assessment doesn’t look like a traditional assessment doesn’t mean that the goal isn’t the same. You still need to have an indication of how well students have performed and whether they’ve achieved mastery.

With this in mind, it’s important for these performance criteria to align with the nature of your task. To return to our business example from earlier, you’d want to make sure that the way you measure students’ performance is reflective of or similar to the expectations they would encounter in a business scenario. For example, you’d want to create performance criteria specific to how students should make the organizational decisions and how accurately and/or appropriately they analyze those decisions. Although students shouldn’t be held to the same standards as professionals in the field (they’re novices, after all), it’s still possible to measure student success in a new and relevant way.

Develop a Rubric

You might be thinking that this seems pretty similar to that last step. Well, it is! When designing your rubric, you should use the performance criteria you’ve identified and come up with measurable levels for each. Once you’ve developed your rubric, consider presenting it to students before they begin the assessment. That way, they know what you expect of them and can more readily gauge their own performance.

For more information on rubrics, feel free to check out our article “ The Benefits of Rubrics in Online Courses .”

Authentic assessment has the outstanding ability to make a long-lasting impact on not only your course, but also the students enrolled in it. By providing students with an opportunity to test their skills in new and relevant situations, you’ll prepare them for how they’ll be assessed in their professional lives and show them the relevance of your course’s content outside the classroom. With that in mind, here are some of the key takeaways from this article:

• Authentic assessment refers to an assessment that requires students to apply what they’ve learned in a new circumstance or situation, typically one that mirrors what would be expected of them in that discipline or field.
• When preparing an authentic assessment for your course, remember that this kind of assessment will likely take more time on both the students’ and facilitator’s parts.
• Authentic assessments should always align with the course’s learning objective(s).
• When identifying a relevant task for your learning objective(s), consider starting with the objective’s verb. In most cases, this will provide an idea of what actions students should be able to perform.
• Essential performance criteria help frame what performance will look like. Without them, it’s difficult to assess students’ work on a fair and consistent basis. Fortunately, instructors can use these criteria to develop a rubric, which in turn helps them evaluate fairly and consistently.

Magda, A. J., & Aslanian, C. B. (2018). Online college students 2018: Comprehensive data on demands and preferences . Louisville, KY: The Learning House, Inc.

Shank, P. (2009, May). Four typical online learning assessment mistakes. In R. Kelly (Ed.), Assessing online learning: Strategies, challenges and opportunities (pp. 4-6). Madison, WI: Magna Publications Inc. Available from https://www.facultyfocus.com/free-reports/assessing-online-learning-strategies-challenges-and-opportunities/

University of Florida. (2018). Authentic assessment in online learning. Retrieved from http://citt.ufl.edu/online-teaching-resources/assessments/authentic-assessment-in-online-learning/

Wiggins, G. (1998). Education assessment: Designing assessments to inform and improve student performance . San Francisco: Joey-Bass Publishers.

Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment evaluates whether the student can successfully transfer the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom to various contexts, scenarios, and situations. Authentic Assessment is grounded in theoretical best practices for teaching and learning and serves as an effective measure for course learning outcomes. In many ways, it can be considered the difference between measuring what students know vs. how they can apply that knowledge. These types of assignments will vary by discipline but typically require students to complete a project. For example, you may ask students to apply an engineering problem to a real world example, develop a web application, design a model, critically review case studies, or create multimedia presentations.  This page has more information on authentic assessment.

What is authentic assessment?

An authentic assessment evaluates if the student can successfully transfer the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom to various contexts, scenarios, and situations beyond the classroom. Authentic assessments can include a myriad of assessment techniques including skill labs, experiments, presentations, simulations, role-plays, class/term projects, debates, discussions, etc. (University at Albany SUNY, n.d.).

The table below from Wiggins (1998) compares traditional assessments (tests and exams) to authentic assessments (tasks).

Source: Indiana University Bloomington's Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning

Why use authentic assessments?

Authentic assessments evaluate how students are learning the course material and subject matter over time. Traditional assessments such as quizzes and exams are useful in providing a snapshot of the students' mastery over the subject at a specific interval, but these assessments do not necessarily evaluate how the student can (or will) apply what was learned beyond the classroom.

Consider the way physicians, professional engineers, electricians, teachers, firefighters, and other professionals are assessed. Students of these professions must provide direct evidence they are competently applying learned knowledge/skills before being allowed to perform them in the real world. This is accomplished by way of an authentic assessment and does not solely rely on a written or oral exam (traditional assessment) (Mueller, n.d.).

Moreover, reliance on traditional assessments may prompt students to learn the material simply to pass the exam and then discard the material (or knowledge and skills) after the exam or course has been completed (Thompson, 2016). Authentic assessments provide students a chance to apply what they've learned and allows students to construct meaning about what they've been taught (Mueller, n.d.).

Lastly, authentic assessments do not have to be chosen over traditional assessments. A mix of both types of assessments can be effective, and in some cases (depending on the course objectives and outcomes), required.

Authentic assessments benefit students in a number of ways, but also present some challenges (adapted from  this resource  from the University of New South Wales Sydney).

Motivates students to deeply engage with the subject matter leading to more constructive and productive learning

Builds a portfolio of academic work, which is helpful for students to:

Reflect on and assess their own work and effort

Seek admission into advanced degree programs and continue their academic career

Pursue career opportunities after earning their degree

Aids students in preparing for the complexities of professional life by equipping them with relevant workplace skills

Prepares students for lifelong learning

Authentic, Formative, and Summative Assessment

There are two types of assessments frequently used in courses: formative and summative.

Formative assessments can be thought of as "spot checks" used throughout the course to assess the student's current grasp of the material and current mastery over the subject matter (e.g. pop quizzes). Formative assessments are focused on evaluating specific knowledge and/or skills at a specific point, the results of which can be used to improve learning as the course progresses (Indiana University Bloomington, n.d.).

Summative assessments are used to measure how well students have mastered the entirety of the material and subject matter sometimes by the mid-point of the course (mid-term) and/or at the end of the course (final).

Well-designed summative assessments can be authentic assessments requiring students to think like a practitioner of the field/discipline (Wiggins, 1998). Authentic (summative) assessments require a significant investment of time from both the student and the instructor. The student will be required to think critically and apply a myriad of skills (merging those learned within the course with those learned outside the course) to approach, evaluate, and solve a problem which may take weeks to solve (e.g. a final project). The instructor will need to take more time to evaluate and grade the students' work than they would if applying a traditional assessment technique such as a multiple choice exam.

How do you design authentic assessments?

The following infographic taken from the  Authentic Assessment Toolbox  created by Mueller (n.d.) provides a design map for creating authentic assessments:

Source: Jon Mueller's Authentic Assessment Toolbox

The first step (STANDARDS) involves reflecting on, writing down, and determining what the goals are for your students (re: course outcomes). Standards can be one-sentence statements or phrases of what students should know and/or be able to do at some point (e.g. "students must define single integrals by week 3"). Course outcomes and standards should be written using  Bloom's Action Verbs , which will help with designing the assessment and to measure how much of the material students have learned.

Read  Step 1 in the Authentic Assessment Toolbox  to learn more about standards.

Authentic Tasks

The second step (AUTHENTIC TASKS) determines how you will know students have met the standards written in Step 1. At this step, selection of the appropriate  authentic task(s)  is performed.

There are three types of authentic tasks:

• Constructed-Response: students construct responses out of previously learned and newly learned knowledge
• Production: students create a deliverable that demonstrates their ability to apply, analyze, and synthesize what they've learned
• Performance: students perform a task that demonstrates their ability to apply, analyze, and synthesize what they've learned

Read Step 2 in the Authentic Assessment Toolbox  to learn more about authentic tasks.

The third step (CRITERIA) establishes indicators of "good performance" on the authentic task(s) selected in Step 2. Students must achieve these criteria when completing authentic tasks to not only demonstrate what they've learned, but that they are also capable of effectively applying what they've learned.

Read Step 3 in the Authentic Assessment Toolbox  to learn more about criteria.

The fourth step (RUBRIC) measures the student's performance on the authentic task(s). Rubrics are essential for structuring the authentic assessment. To start building the rubric, use the criteria established in Step 3 and then decide whether to create an analytic rubric or holistic rubric.

An analytic rubric is used when performance will be evaluated for each criterion. A holistic rubric is used when all of the criteria are evaluated together (holistically).

Read Step 4 in the Authentic Assessment Toolbox  to learn more about rubrics.

• Assessing Authentically. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://teaching.unsw.edu.au/authentic-assessment
• Authentic Assessment. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/authentic-assessment/
• Bloom's Taxonomy Action Verbs. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.fresnostate.edu/academics/oie/documents/assesments/Blooms%20Level.pdf
• Mueller, Jon. (n.d.). "How Do You Create Authentic Assessments?" Retrieved from http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/howdoyoudoit.htm
• Mueller, Jon. (n.d.). "Why Use Authentic Assessment?" Retrieved from http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whydoit.htm
• Summative and Formative Assessment. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/authentic-assessment/
• Thompson, Steven. “The Differences Between Traditional and Authentic Assessment.” YouTube , YouTube, 2 July 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOupbmSx27A
• Unit 2: Types of Authentic Assessment. (2008, May 14). Retrieved from https://tccl.arcc.albany.edu/knilt/index.php/Unit_2:_Types_of_Authentic_Assessment
• Wiggins, G. (1998). Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Authentic Assessment: The Ultimate Guide

Students are unprepared for careers. They enter the workforce feeling “exhausted,” “lost,” and “anxious,” according to a Harvard Business Review article . Can authentic assessment have something to do with it? 

At first glance, perhaps the weariness is generational. Millennials and young people don’t have mindsets as determined as the generations preceding them. But that can't be it. 

A cultural tension exists in the transition from college to the professional world. Research finds three key dimensions reinforced throughout the educational journey ultimately disappear with the swap of a diploma and the swing of a revolving workplace door. 

Feedback. Relationships. Accountability. 

Let’s take a look at feedback and authentic assessment. For years, learners are accustomed to immediate feedback and graded assignments. These grades are understood as reflections of the caliber of students’ work. Their value is reflected in the grades.

Imagine a student who earns an A on the test, but fails miserably when applying it to a real-world scenario. Do formulas matter if students can’t apply them outside of the classroom environment?

Graded feedback has been around for decades. And let’s be honest, the majority of current assessments reveal what schools and systems don’t measure well. Grades have their limitations.  

No matter the skill level, feedback is provided. Instant gratification in the form of letters, percentage grades, or gold stars is provided to students with hopes of improvement on future assignments.

Yet, when graduates enter the workforce, there are no letter grades. Black and white words are rarely destroyed with the single stroke of a hovering red pen. 

The paradigm shifts in the professional workforce. Early career professionals are left to fend for themselves, or at the very least adapt to the limited, or nonexistent, feedback provided.

A lack of effective assessment impacts students well beyond the confines of the classroom. How do we solve this problem?

It’s simple: incorporate authentic assessment.

What is Authentic Assessment?

Authentic assessment is the ultimate method of measuring what matters. 

This method for assessing academic achievement transforms students into active participants in learning. Teachers in turn encourage their students to reflect on the relevance of their instruction to improve the learning experience for both instructor and student. 

Essays and multiple-choice exams fall short in relating to the real world. You can instruct students to read a book on hydroynamics front-to-back, but that doesn't mean they've mastered the ability to swim.

Diving in and applying the techniques from the textbook incorporate authentic assessment, which offers more direct evidence of application and construction of knowledge than traditional assessments.

One of the key determinants in defining authentic assessment is challenging students to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills, according to Jon Mueller, Professor of Psychology at North Central College and authentic assessment expert.

Educators like Dr. Mann and Dr. Jarrett evaluate their teaching methodologies'  effectiveness to understand if students are learning concepts they can apply long after graduation.

That's why authentic assessment is so valuable--it enables individuals to use what they learn in a real-world context.

If the goal is to prepare students for career success, knowledge recollection is just the tip of the iceberg. While it's important to recall information, it's more important to apply it. That’s where educators find themselves asking questions like:

• What types of demands are employees facing daily?
• How do the concepts talked about in the classroom relate to everyday business decisions?

The Importance of Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment measures the student’s actual ability of what he or she learns and improves future student performance. Exhibiting knowledge of a subject is one thing. But learning how to apply it is another. We want students to use the knowledge and skills they learn in the classroom well beyond graduation.

Anna Lennox, a University of Waterloo graduate, attributes her success to growing up on a farm. And also to the hands-on learning aspects of being involved in the decision-making process throughout the Capstone simulation during her senior year.

“Trying to bring our real-life perspective to our decisions and to understand our results helped us move forward,” Anna said.

Authentic assessment--like running a company with millions of dollars at stake--helps students perform real-world tasks and improve student performance. 

We need more assessments that can tell us if students can meaningfully apply the skills and knowledge they learned in authentic situations. We need an accurate means of measuring real-world skills. 

Different Types of Authentic Assessment

According to the George Lucas Educational Foundation , different types of authentic assessment include:

• Observation
• Performance tasks
• Exhibitions and demonstrations
• Teacher-created tests
• Self- and peer-evaluation
• Simulations

Looking at the list, those all sound like viable solutions to go about evaluating students in an environment you’re comfortable with. Throw that into an environment that’s brand-new and virtual… now we’ve got a problem on our hands. 

If It's So Neat, Why Don't We See It More Often?

If authentic assessment is so incredible, why don’t we see more of it?

While the different types of authentic assessment, also known as alternative assessment, are valid, implementing them effectively in an online environment is difficult. 

Most people don’t have the time, energy, or resources to build effective authentic assessments. If it’s so incredible, why don’t we see more of it?

In the shifting educational landscape , technology is the answer to enhance pedagogy and give students more meaningful learning experiences. Creating valid exercises for students is a science, and it takes plenty of time to go about it the right way.

As instructors, you can’t and shouldn’t do it all. But you do need the right tools for the job. And we have the perfect solution for you to incorporate into your lesson plan. 

As the educational landscape continues to shift online, adding the environment is a whole new level of complexity. But we’re convinced the shift is here to stay. 

Technology streamlines the science of learning, and authentic assessment is the key ingredient baked into the process. 

Now You Can Evaluate Students in a Real-World Context with the CapsimInbox Authoring Platform

What if there was an easy way to evaluate students in a real-world context?

What if you could evaluate students on their real-world responses in an email environment?

Now, there is. 

Simulations are the future of learning. They provide students with the opportunity to practice real-world scenarios (in a safe environment) and measure application within moments of submitting an experience. Immediate feedback empowers students to grow throughout the immersive learning journey. 

Capsim combines many of the types of authentic and formative assessments in one platform. CapsimInbox encourages opportunities to rehearse, practice, consult resources, and get feedback to refine performances and products.

The platform also  helps educators create their own authentic assessments personalized by their knowledge and expertise. Today more than ever, we’re looking to improve student learning, from both the educator and student perspectives. 

But, there’s great news. There are now tools and solutions to enhance the online learning experience.

Let’s take a look at how the CapsimInbox Authoring Platform stacks up against the qualities of an authentic assessment and helps educators easily create their own.

The Purpose of Authentic Assessment

Authentic Assessment asks students to “do” the subject. Capsim replicates the context in which learners are put to the test in the real world. Individuals learn more than skills they can apply in future workplaces. 

An Adobe 2019 Email Usage study revealed respondents spend 352 minutes, or five hours and 52 minutes a day, sifting through work and personal emails. 

Email communication integrates numerous aspects of everyday work and personal life and will continue to do so in the future.

Many users can’t even get to the bottom of their inboxes. But in Capsim simulations, learners tackle not only an influx of real-world work scenarios but the added challenge of getting through them all. 

In CapsimInbox, learners are immersed in a role at a fictitious company and choose what they believe are the best responses to various real-world situations in a real-world environment.

The authenticity creates a relevant and practical learning experience that parallels today’s workplace environment. Responses indicate proficiency levels on the skills and learning outcomes being measured such as communicating, prioritizing, critical-thinking, and problem-solving.

Replicating the Context in which Adults are “Tested” in the Workplace

The situations learners face and the decisions they make can be adapted into different vehicles, like email. Inboxes are the perfect vehicle for authentic assessments as it’s a crucial, everyday component of real life. 

Authentic Assessment asks students to “do” the subject. CapsimInbox is a simulated email experience that measures key career skills with every reply. It’s an easy and experiential way to engage and develop today’s learners.

Opportunities to Rehearse, Practice, Consult Resources, and Garner Feedback

Once participants complete the CapsimInbox simulation experience, they immediately receive a report containing actionable and objective feedback based on their performance:

Getting Started with CapsimInbox

If you’re looking to transform the learning experience, there are two ways to get started with CapsimInbox.

Choose an existing version , such as Ethical Decision-making, General Management, Crisis Management (we have 15+ versions and counting)

Build a version : we recently pre-released a free, user-friendly builder to help educators personalize their teaching experience. 

We look forward to building more engaging learning experiences with you.

75% of Companies Train with Simulations.

But not all simulations are created equal..

Ask These 7 Questions To Invest In The Right Simulation From Day 1

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3 ways experiential learning helps students launch their career, capsim featured in recent issue of business education forum, how to increase knowledge retention in your l&d program.

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Designing Authentic Assessment

The best types of assessments are those that not only provide an evaluation of student work, but also prompt students to deepen their understanding of course content and improve their skills and performance.  

Authentic assessment aims to test skills and knowledge in “real world” applications that are relevant to future disciplinary professions. An authentic task encourages student success and course completion by promoting an awareness of the value of the work to student goals and/or future professions, encouraging student self-directed learning, promoting a growing sense of competency in the student, and fostering a sense of relatedness, not just between theory and practice, but between students and various social groups.  

All of these factors encourage motivation, which promotes course completion and student success.

Components of Authentic Assessment

Since authentic assessments are based in real-world scenarios that are often complex and nuanced, they:

• require application of theory to realistic professional practice,
• require judgment and innovation, 
• assess integration of student skills and knowledge to negotiate a complex task,
• and, are iterative in nature, with timely feedback encouraging students to develop and improve their skill sets.

Comparison Between Typical and Authentic Assessments

Examples of authentic assessment.

• Biology or Chemistry : Draw a diagram of how a process works, indicating what happens if "X" occurs
• Business : Develop a business, marketing or sales plan for an imaginary (or real) company in a student's area of interest
• Computer Science : Troubleshoot a problematic piece of code, develop a website or app to solve a problem and/or meet a set of criteria
• History : Engage in role play of a particular event in history; describe what might have happened if one element of a historical event changed
• Nursing : Provide a case study of a patient and ask students to assess and create a plan of care
• Psychology : Examine/critique a case study from multiple theoretical positions
• Public Affairs or Service Learning courses : Consider how a community agency might be impacted by a particular challenge (budget cuts, infrastructure outage, public health crisis, etc.)

Considerations for Designing Authentic Assessment

As instructors consider authentic assessment for their course, it can be helpful to consider: 

• How will you scaffold the learning outcomes? (How does acquisition of knowledge, a skill or set of skills relate to and depend on other skills or knowledge?)
• How will you provide support for students during authentic assessment? Remember to consider your own time and/or availability.  
• How long should coursework and assessments take for students? When planning the flow and timeline of coursework and assessments, remember that authentic assessments take longer for the students to complete.
• How will you address student concerns? Students can feel anxious about how they will be graded. Allow time to discuss their concerns and share your grading criteria with them.
• If your course is online, how will you coordinate teamwork? Online teamwork can be difficult to coordinate.  
• What constraints may students be facing? Using a pre-course survey may help you determine what constraints students may be facing and allow you to consider adjustments to the depth of the assessment and/or the time allowed for completion of the task.
• Encourage effective student collaboration 

Helpful steps to plan for instruction:  

• Identify or review learning outcomes; consider whether they lend themselves to real-world scenarios.
• When designing an authentic assessment, start by thinking about the activities of professionals in the discipline, and consider whether students could approximate such tasks.  
• If a professional task cannot be carried out, consider whether the students could apply themselves to a relevant and new situation that is appropriate to their discipline — it can be useful to think about the learning outcome(s) as a verb and then design the scenario. Make it clear to the students how the scenario/task is relevant to their goals and/or future profession.
• Select the performance criteria for grading and design a rubric that clearly outlines expectations, and share the rubric with students. This approach helps provide clarity to the students, and helps us to be consistent in our grading.

Key Takeaways

Remember that not all assessments must be “authentic assessment.” Instructors can use more typical, low stakes assessments to scaffold learning and build toward a summative authentic assessment.  

Sometimes, for any number of reasons — future graduate entry, professional school entry exams, etc. — instructors may want to retain more typical assessments (e.g. timed multiple-choice tests). The aim is always to help students succeed.  

If assessments allow students to practice skills that are necessary for their current or future success, they, too, are valid. 

What is authentic assessment? Bringing authentic assessment to life

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Authentic assessment is an approach that can enable learning by measuring additional components of knowledge. Assessment , as we know, is a crucial part of the learning process, where educators can see what students know and don’t know, as well as why students do or don’t understand a particular concept. As Dylan Williams says: “Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning—it is only through assessment that we can find out whether what has happened in the classroom has produced the learning we intended” ( 2011 ).

Prioritizing the learning experience for students doesn’t conclude with the end of an activity, lecture, or course module; it is part of a continuum. Assessments, too, can be a part of the process when teachers understand how to supplement student learning and when students receive feedback on next steps.

Assessments come in different forms. Traditional assessments are typically time-bound and require students to choose or offer a response. They test the recall and recognition of knowledge. However, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that authentic assessment not only enhances academic integrity, but is a more effective way to assess student learning. Authentic assessments, in turn, are typically iterative and ask students to perform a task, calling for the application of knowledge.

But what is an authentic assessment? And what does it entail? In this post, we dive into the definition of authentic assessment and its benefits. Furthermore, we offer examples of authentic assessment that can be used in a variety of grades or subject areas to reflect the depth of authentic learning.

When determining how best to assess student knowledge, most educators would choose an assessment that not only accurately measures a student’s learning, but simultaneously helps to improve their understanding of the skills taught in that course and their relevance beyond the classroom. Such assessments would be considered “authentic” because they involve the application of knowledge in situations beyond the classroom.

Authentic assessment is a type of assessment that requires learners to apply their knowledge and skills in a real-world context. It measures what students know by demonstrating how they can apply their knowledge. This type of assessment is designed to measure students' ability to think critically, solve problems, and communicate effectively.

In constructivist philosophy , learning is optimized when the students base their understanding on their own concrete experiences gleaned from relevant learning. John Dewey, an educational reformer and one of the forefathers of constructivist theory, valued real-life contexts and problems as an educational experience. As Saul Mcleod, Ph.D. goes on to say: “[Dewey] believed that if students only passively perceive a problem and do not experience its consequences in a meaningful, emotional, and reflective way, they are unlikely to adapt and revise their habits or construct new habits, or will only do so superficially.”

Through a constructivist lens, authentic learning leads to deeper understanding and authentic assessment explicitly measures that understanding. When instructors can create tasks that mirror the very challenges faced by that discipline in the real world, then students can adequately transfer what they’ve learned to various contexts, scenarios, and situations.

In this way, authentic assessment helps learning go beyond memorization and helps deepen understanding and relevance of course content.

There are a variety of ways to approach creating an assignment or assessment that is authentic. According to Grant Wiggins, an assignment is authentic if it:

• is realistic.
• requires judgment and innovation.
• asks the student to “do” the subject.
• replicates or simulates the contexts in which adults are “tested” in the workplace or in civic or personal life.
• assesses the student’s ability to efficiently and effectively use a repertoire of knowledge and skills to negotiate a complex task.
• allows appropriate opportunities to rehearse, practice, consult resources, and get feedback on and refine performances and products ( 1998 ).

Conventional tests and conventional test questions such as those in standardized multiple-choice exams are often an indirect measure of a student's ability to apply the skills and knowledge gained in the classroom. While students may know the facts, do we know if they can apply them? And how deeply do they understand concepts? While conventional tests play an important part in curriculum–and are frequently easier to grade and create—there is value in considering an authentic assessment over a conventional assessment for many reasons.

Firstly, students are often more engaged in authentic assessments because they involve real-world tasks, which makes them more interesting and motivating. Next, instead of rote memorization, these assessments require high-order thinking and problem-solving, asking students to choose which skills to apply, how, and where. If instructors can provide a rubric that details the specific criteria by which the assessment will be graded, oftentimes the challenge of grading authentic assessments can be mitigated.

Consider the table below, drawn from Wiggins and created by Indiana University Bloomington (USA) , which illustrates the differences between typical tests and authentic assessments:

Authentic assessments can be contrasted with conventional test questions, which are often indirect measures of a student’s ability to apply the knowledge and skills gained in a course. Conventional tests have an important place in courses, but should be coupled with authentic assessment wherever possible.

Authentic assessment can take many forms, some with a lighter lift than educators may expect. In fact, there can be robust opportunities for students to illustrate their learning with projects, oral presentations, and other hands-on options that ultimately makes grading less tiresome for an instructor and possibly more enjoyable for students.

Below are a just a few ideas for authentic assessments that can be adapted for different grade levels and subject areas:

• Portfolios: Portfolios are collections of student work that demonstrate their learning over time. Portfolios can include essays, projects, presentations, and other artifacts. In a conference setting with parents and/or educators, students can then talk about their portfolios and explain areas of confidence and areas of growth.
• Performance tasks: Performance tasks are activities that require students to apply their knowledge and skills in a real-world context. Performance tasks can include debates, presentations, and experiments.
• Projects: Projects are long-term assignments that require students to use a variety of skills and knowledge to complete a task. Projects can be individual or group projects, and they can be completed in or out of school.
• Debates: Debates are opportunities for students to argue for or against a particular point of view. Debates can be held in class or in a public forum.
• Simulations: Simulations are computer programs that allow students to experience real-world situations. Simulations can be used to teach a variety of subjects, including science, history, and economics.

Instructors in university or graduate programs may be interested to see how Indiana University Bloomington approaches authentic assessment with the diagram below:

The University of New South Wales (AUS) , maintains that “Authenticity is a fundamental characteristic of good assessment practice” and that “students usually value it highly.”

When a nursing student is asked to participate in, say, a simulation or role play of a scenario in place of writing an essay on “The benefits of good bedside manner,” the student must contextualize their learning and react to the real-world unpredictability and complexity that a scenario presents. Instead of merely writing about how they would try to soothe a nervous patient in the operating room, they would have to engage in role play, apply what they have learned in their courses, and solve problems in real-time. In this situation, both the instructor and the students themselves will see the competency they have gained through study.

In addition to motivating students to learn and engage, the benefits of authentic assessment include:

• Providing a more accurate picture of students' learning.
• Helping students to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Supporting students in increasing their communication and collaboration skills.
• Allowing teachers to differentiate instruction for all learners.

Overall, the benefits go both ways: students glean a meaningful amount of information and can showcase their knowledge effectively when assessed authentically; educators can acquire a more accurate understanding and measurement of their students’ learning and see very clearly what they know and where they have potential to grow.

In one study, researchers discovered that authentic assessment tasks that include interactive orals help prevent academic misconduct: “The more relevant the assessment to real-world scenarios, the less likely students are to engage in misconduct.” The study goes on to say that “interactive oral exams enabled students to develop their professional identity and awareness, and communications skills, and help promote employability” ( Sotiriadou et al., 2020 ).

In another study, a group of 18 students in New Zealand worked together to develop focused community projects to affect sustainable change. Upon reflection, the students themselves reported many benefits of authentic assessment including, “workplace realism, a greater level of personal investment and opportunities to draw on diverse skills” ( Asgarova et al., 2023 ).

Authentic assessment is deeply tied to authentic learning , an approach to education based deeply in constructivism, which theorizes that learners ought to take an active role in building their own understanding rather than passively receiving information. When a student can participate in activities that not only require their presence of mind and involvement, but also connect to real-world scenarios, their learning then hinges on concrete skills that they can readily apply to their lives.

In sum, authentic assessments are valuable for students and teachers alike. The complexity of tasks requires students to use a variety of skills and knowledge to complete the assessment. They are realistic because they simulate real-world situations that students will encounter outside of school. And they provide a more accurate picture of students' learning to help educators improve their instruction and students to develop the skills they need to succeed in the classroom, the workforce, and life.

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What Are Authentic Assessments?

May 23, 2023 //  by  Lindsay Ann //   Leave a Comment

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What Are Authentic Assessments? Is it authentic to have a student deliver a persuasive speech about climate change to an audience of teenagers, not policymakers?  Is it authentic to have a student complete a blog project that gets shared among classmates but not posted online for a wider audience?  Is it authentic to have students write an essay under timed conditions that no one but the teacher will read?

To establish a definition for authentic assessment , let’s look at what the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence says about it: 

“Authentic assessments involve the application of knowledge and skills in real-world situations, scenarios, or problems ,” and they “create a student-centered learning experience by providing students opportunities to problem-solve, inquire, and create new knowledge and meaning .” 

That sounds like an authentic authentic assessment definition to me!  With that definition of authentic assessment in mind, then, I can’t help but reflect on the types of assessments typically seen in the classroom.

Real-World Situations, Scenarios, or Problems

Think about authentic assessment versus traditional assessment in the classroom.  Ideally, authentic or not, assessment comes in two flavors– formative and summative .

Formative assessment is assessment for learning –a diagnostic, checking in on what students know and can do now (either before or after instruction), priming them for more instruction, intervention, support, and/or enrichment.

Summative assessment is assessment of learning –an evaluation, checking in on what students know and can do at the end of an instructional sequence that involved teaching, learning, intervention, support, and/or enrichment.

A traditional assessment can certainly be both formative and summative.  

For instance, if I am teaching students how to properly use a semicolon to join together two complete sentences, I can assign students a formative pre-test asking them to add a semicolon in the right place or to identify which sentence uses a semicolon correctly.  

From the results of that pre-test, I can determine who’s got it and who’s gotta learn it.  I can then instruct and intervene as necessary, ensuring each student is getting it.  

But how do I know if they got it? Assessment , that’s how.  

At the end of my instructional sequence, students are ready for the biggie–the summative .  Here, then, is the quiz where I ask students to write several sentences using a semicolon properly or select A-B-C -or -D to identify where a semicolon was used correctly.  

At this point, I would hope we can all celebrate students’ semicolon skills; that would be amazing.  

But in that instructional sequence of formative and summative assessments did students encounter real-world situations, scenarios or problems ?  

I don’t think so.  (How often, for example, does your principal ask you to take a multiple choice test at work?)  

Perhaps then that’s a good way to think of traditional vs. authentic assessments: 

Does what we are asking students to do look like school work?  (Schoolwork = it’s good at this moment, for this class, on this occasion.)  Or does it look like the situations, scenarios, or problems we are going to expect students to solve in the world around them?  

(Unless I’m mistaken here, I don’t think the reason we haven’t stopped climate change is because someone picked A instead of C , for example.)

Authentic Assessment Benefits

So what are authentic assessments?  Authentic assessments are assessments that fit the world around us , not just the walls of the classroom trapping us. I can see the benefits of that. We aren’t limiting students to share with us their learning in one way; we are, instead, giving them the opportunity to show growth and learning in different ways .  

We aren’t developing knowledge and skills specific and limited to future English teachers; we are, instead, building skills for life and learning wherever they go. 

In short, with authentic assessment, we are giving students permission to take risks, to learn, and to grow as they take on classroom tasks that parallel real-life ones.

Authentic Assessment Examples: Writing

So what does authentic assessment in the classroom look like? 

How can we move students’ voices out of the vacuum of the classroom ? 

How can we make arguments persuasive and convincing to an audience beyond the teacher ? 

How can students write about something that matters to them rather than something that matters to the teacher?

Here are some ideas and examples:

1. Find a writing contest that’s appropriate for your curriculum and level.  For example, the New York Times hosts a variety of student-writing contests throughout the course of the year for everything from narratives to editorials .  These writing contests put students’ writing in front of an audience outside of the classroom and ask students to write in the style of what people read in the “real world.”

2. Take inspiration from the College Board .  One of the essays for AP English Language and Composition is a synthesis prompt for which students read a prompt and then digest visual and written texts (sources) to inform their opinion and help craft their line of reasoning.  

These prompts center-on real-world issues, conversations, and subjects (like space exploration, federal currency, eminent domain, etc.).  

Perhaps begin with one of these prompts and ask students to investigate these real-world issues/questions/subjects , select an audience to write to, and then craft an argument to share.

(For instance, a student could write a letter to Elon Musk about SpaceX and space exploration. Maybe he’d even tweet a response–if Twitter is still around.)

3. Try podcasting or blogging . Assignments that integrate writing as a part of a larger product with a wider audience and purpose, that involve inquiry and use of multiple skills are engaging AND authentic.

4 . Have students practice the art of rhetoric by writing to a real entity : a parent, adult, teacher, organization, political figure, etc. The key here is actually sending the letter! 

Authentic Assessment Examples: Reading

How can we make sure students aren’t skipping a book and getting a summary from a website?  

How can we keep students from asking ChatGPT to tell them the theme of a poem?  

How can we interest students in challenging themselves as readers?  

1. Form student book clubs .  If we know the skills we are teaching students, arguably, we can select just about any developmentally and curriculum-appropriate text to help them learn those skills.  Or, better yet, we can let students have a choice in selecting those texts (even if it’s from a curated list of texts we provide to them).  

If we think of the reading that adults do (when they aren’t immersed in TikToks themselves), it’s in books of their choosing connected to something in which they are interested or about which they want to know more. 

Many adults join book clubs, too, where they create (or find) questions to help them think about style, purpose, theme, plot , etc. as they collaboratively analyze a text .  

We can mimic this in the classroom, helping students see the long-term value in reading in the real-world and assess their reading skills in real-time during discussions and reflections .  

(After all, if it’s good enough for Oprah , it’s probably good enough for our students.)

2. Understand and address a real-world problem or issue .  On the local, national, and international level, questions are debated everywhere .  

Likely, our students aren’t experts on these subjects–but they can gain an informed opinion by reading the perspectives of others and understanding how their thinking is shaped by what they read.  

As such, you could ask students to read a variety of perspectives on a subject/issue/topic/question. Then, ask students to summarize the sources’ arguments , noting the sources’ purpose(s), claim(s), and evidence.  

By giving students the ability to construct an informed opinion, you are giving them opportunities to problem solve, inquire, and create new knowledge and meaning (all parts of the authentic assessment definition) –which could culminate in an essay, speech, editorial, etc., perhaps in a they say I say format where students show their understanding of others’ perspectives and use them to support (and even challenge) their own.

3. Have students engage in a passion project or inquiry project. The sources they find serve the purpose of showcasing their learning in an authentic way. This purpose amps up reading engagement. 

Inspiration from Everywhere

Indeed, when we think of authentic assessment in the classroom, we can take inspiration from anywhere . 

As I sit here typing this blog post, for instance, I think about how this is my very own blog project authentic assessment.  

I’m not being graded or scored by a teacher; I’m being read and evaluated by you, curious reader !  

To complete this blog project, I’m considering a number of real-world factors : the desires of my audience, search engine optimization, my professional expertise, deadlines, the information available already online, etc. 

 When I’m done typing the blog post, I go through and edit and revise because I want you to see me as authoritative, credible. 

The final blog project – the summative – posted and shared online in the “real world” “is about as authentic as it comes as I await feedback from you, curious reader .  

So… like and share the post if you think I should get an A on this authentic assessment–because nothing’s more authentic than a letter signifying my attainment of a skill, right? 😉

About Lindsay Ann

Lindsay has been teaching high school English in the burbs of Chicago for 18 years. She is passionate about helping English teachers find balance in their lives and teaching practice through practical feedback strategies and student-led learning strategies. She also geeks out about literary analysis, inquiry-based learning, and classroom technology integration. When Lindsay is not teaching, she enjoys playing with her two kids, running, and getting lost in a good book.

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15 Authentic Assessment Examples (Definition and Critique)

Authentic assessment is a way of assessing student learning by having students apply what they learned to real-life scenarios . The goal is for students to demonstrate they have learned the material by transferring classroom knowledge to situations that resemble the outside world.

So, the teacher creates various situations that mimic those found in everyday life and then the student is observed applying their knowledge to that situation.

Authentic Assessment Definition

Authentic assessment emerged as a counterpoint to the rise of norm-referenced standardized testing in the 1980s onward.

Generally, the key scholars cited when discussing authentic assessment are Archbald and Newmann (1989). Newmann defines it like this:

“…the extent to which a lesson, assessment task, or sample of student performance represents construction of knowledge through the use of disciplined inquiry that has some value or meaning beyond success in school” (Newmann, 1997, p. 361)

Here the key idea is that the assessment is linked to out-of-school application of knowledge rather than simply summative assessments in the form of purely theoretical and standardized tests.

The Strength of Authentic Assessment

The central strength of authentic assessment is that it encourages educators to focus on application of knowledge at school to real life. It aims to work against the narrative that school doesn’t prepare students for the real world.

Reinforcing this point, Wiggins argues that authentic assessment tasks are all about applicability to the world beyond school:

“The tasks [in authentic assessment should be] either replicas of or analogous to the kinds of problems faced by adult citizens and consumers or professionals in the field” (Wiggins, 1993, p. 229)

Traditional assessment techniques such as quizzes and exams are useful ways to assess memory of basic facts and concepts. However, authentic assessment is a way to evaluate if students can put that knowledge to use to solve a real-world problem.

Critiques of Authentic Assessment

• Lack of Clear Definition of Authenticity : Authentic assessment sounds like a great concept, but critics often highlight that the idea lacks clarity. There are few systematic explanations of how an assessment is authentic.
• Quality of Assessment is Questionable; If teachers use authentic assessment as a turn away from norm-referenced standardized tests, then the rigor and testability of student assessment may be lost. There are no clear guidelines on how to measure or grade an ‘authentic’ assessment piece.
• Authenticity is not always Achieved: It is also questionable as to whether an assessment is truly authentic just because it mirrors a real-life scenario. A flight simulator may be considered more authentic than a theoretical test about how to fly a plane, but it is by no means an authentic experience in the same way as actually flying an airplane.

Authentic Assessment Examples

• Creating models: A physics teacher has students work in teams to design and construct a paper bridge and then see how much weight it can support.
• Using scenarios from the workforce: The final exam in a radiology course involves students being given a set of 5 X-rays that they have to sort in terms of priority of treatment.
• Engaging with the profession: A business administration professor may require students to construct their own employee satisfaction survey, collect data, and produce 3 graphs that display the key findings.
• Pitching ideas to professionals: Advertising majors are required to design a comprehensive ad campaign for the product of their choice and then pitch it to a small group of faculty.  
• Demonstrating practical skills: Music majors are required to give a recital at the end of the course as part of their final exam.
• Engaging in mock-up scenarios: Students in a criminology course are taken to a mock crime scene and tasked with looking for clues and formulating an initial theory of what happened.
• Creating reports on real life scenarios: Students in a home economics course make a comprehensive budget for a middle-class family of five that includes all utility bills, insurance fees and taxes, and disposable income allocations.
• Creating a valuable program or app: Computer science majors are given a specific period of time to program a cyber-security firewall that can stop at least 3 out of 5 viruses set to attack their computer.
• Collecting samples from the field: Biology students are sent into the field where they must collect three soil samples at different locations on a farm and then analyze the nitrate and phosphorous levels of each sample.
• Getting real customers: Instead of just creating a business plan, going the next step and creating the business and getting real customers, then being assessed on implementation rather than just planning.

Detailed Examples

1. mock trial.

Learning about statutes in a university course on criminal law can be tedious, and grueling. There is a ton of case law to read and grades can be based on writing a lot of papers. However, integrating authentic assessment can be a way for students to practice their skills in a life-like situation.

For example, the professor divides the class into teams of three. Each team is given the same details of a criminal law case and then assigned to play the role of prosecution or defense. Of course, the professor will play the role of judge.

After two weeks of preparation, the students participate in a mock trial.

Each side gets to present their case, call witnesses, and conduct questioning.

This kind of mock trial can become as complex as time will allow. That can range from a short and simple presentation of arguments, to an event that involves every step of the process, from jury selection, to the preparation of courtroom exhibits and closing arguments.

Memorizing case law is one form of learning, but applying that law to the courtroom requires a completely different set of skills.

2. Comic Strip Adaptation

Comic books have made a comeback in the lives of teenagers. The interesting color schemes, artistic style, and action-oriented illustrations capture the attention of youth today.

That presents an opportunity for teachers. For example, a language arts teacher may assign a short story reading about a historical event or current affair.

These topics might be boring to some students, but when the teacher announces that the assignment involves students making their own comic books that portray those historical events, faces start to brighten-up.

The teacher explains that students will work in small groups and make a short comic book about the event they learned about. The number of pages are specified as well as other requirements regarding historical accuracy and the citing of facts, but beyond that, it’s up to the students.

This is an example of students taking information and knowledge they have learned in one medium, and then transferring it to another.

3. Anthropology Class

Believe it or not, anthropology students need to know a lot about human anatomy. The chemical composition of a skeleton can reveal a lot about the living environment and dietary intake of the person’s life when they were alive.

To put students’ knowledge of skeletal anatomy to the test, an anthropology professor has buried various bones in a designated location on campus. The bones come from both male and female skeletons, young and old, and different ethnicities. Just for fun, the prof throws in a few animal bones too, just to make things interesting.

The students work in groups, are assigned different plots, and given a specific period of time to unearth the bones, examine them thoroughly, and identify the designated characteristics.

Grades can be based on accuracy and how long it took for each team to complete the task. However, any team that mistook an animal femur for a human’s automatically fails.

4. Writing Employment Ads

After completing the chapter on job descriptions in an HR course, the instructor gives the students a true test of their understanding. They are to assume they work for the government and must write a job description and employment ad for a given job.

First, the class is broken down into small groups. Then, various job titles are written on slips of paper, folded, and placed in a hat. Each group selects a slip of paper and then gets started.

The assignment sounds simple enough and most groups finish within t0 minutes. They turn in their assignment and get to leave class early. However, one group seems to be taking a bit longer. The instructor investigates.

That group decides that their first step is to find a full and detailed job description from the appropriate government department, the pay scale schedule for that government position, and study the federal guidelines on equal employment from the EEOC .  They finish the assignment just in time.

At the next class, the instructor reveals that all groups failed the assignment except for the last one. The failing groups wrote ads that contained statements that are illegal and violate EEOC guidelines.

As the professor explained, had those ads actually been published, the company would have been sued for discriminatory practices and the head of HR most likely fired.

5. Healthy Habits Program

Being healthy is about more than just eating right and getting some exercise. It also includes establishing good sleep habits, developing a social support system, and a positive perspective on life.

So, students in nutrition, physical education, and health psychology courses are assigned a collaborative project. By working in small teams, they are to design a comprehensive Healthy Habits program for middle schools.

The program must contain several key components of health : physical, emotional, intellectual, social, and spiritual. Assessment of outcomes must include a rubric of both physical and psychological domains.

The students are given until the end of the academic term to design their programs and grades will be determined through peer assessment.

Authentic assessment takes a very pragmatic approach to evaluating student outcomes. Instead of asking students to repeat memorized facts or write abstract essays, they are tasked with demonstrating skills.

Teachers create situations that resemble those often encountered in an actual job, and the students attempt to resolve whatever challenges exist in that situation. Grades are based on observed performance.

Any type of course can include authentic assessment. Law students might perform in a mock trial, anthropology students may need to dig up a few bones and identify who they belong to, or students in an HR course may have to construct their own employee satisfaction survey. However, it is questionable as to whether authentic assessments can also be formal assessments or exams that can be administered en masse to compare students’ performances.

Archbald, D. & Newmann, F. (1989) “The Functions of Assessment and the Nature of Authentic Academic Achievement,” in Berlak (ed.) Assessing Achievement: Toward the development of a New Science of Educational Testing. Buffalo, NY: SUNY Press.

Ashford-Rowe, K., Herrington, J., & Brown, C. (2014). Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39 (2), 205-222.

Cumming, J.J. & Maxwell, G.S. (1999). Contextualizing authentic assessment. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policies, and Practices, 6 (2), 177-194.

Newmann, F.M. (1997). Authentic assessment in social studies: Standards and examples. In G.D. Phye (Ed.), Handbook of classroom assessment: Learning, adjustment and achievement. San Diego, Ca: Academic Press.

Palm, T. (2008). Performance assessment and authentic assessment: A conceptual analysis of the literature.  Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation ,  13 (1), 4.

Wiggins, G. P. (1993). Assessing student performance . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Koh, K., Tan, C., & Ng, P. T. (2012). Creating thinking schools through authentic assessment: The case in Singapore. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 24 (2), 135-149. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-011-9138-y

Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 25 Positive Punishment Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 25 Dissociation Examples (Psychology)
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 15 Zone of Proximal Development Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link Perception Checking: 15 Examples and Definition

Dave Cornell (PhD)

Dr. Cornell has worked in education for more than 20 years. His work has involved designing teacher certification for Trinity College in London and in-service training for state governments in the United States. He has trained kindergarten teachers in 8 countries and helped businessmen and women open baby centers and kindergartens in 3 countries.

• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ 25 Positive Punishment Examples
• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ 25 Dissociation Examples (Psychology)
• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ 15 Zone of Proximal Development Examples
• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ Perception Checking: 15 Examples and Definition

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Authentic assessment

Guidance on authentic assessment and where to start in practice. 

  What’s in this guide?

This guide is designed as an introduction to authentic assessment.  There are some ideas for you to consider, followed by links to further reading, guidance and support. Please get in touch if you want to chat about incorporating   more authentic assessment into your curriculum. 

• What is Authentic assessment?
• Why make assessments ‘authentic’ ?

How to create authentic assessments

• Get Inspired (examples of authentic assessment)
• Review your existing assessment
• Build in authentic assessment

Important considerations

References and further reading, what is authentic assessment.

An authentic assessment is, in essence, one that requires students to ‘do’ the subject. It is no more or less valid or rigorous than other forms of assessment, nor does the title imply that other assessment approaches lack ‘authenticity’.

Rather, such assessments require students to apply their knowledge and judgement in response to ‘authentic’, real-world, situations or problems and is one of many models which are rooted in ‘real-world’, experiential, teaching and learning such as: ‘integrated’; ‘work-related’; ‘contextual’; ‘alternative’, ‘team -based’ or ‘situated’ learning, ‘education for sustainable development’, and many more. 

The many authentic assessment approaches, models and definitions provided in the literature can typically be characterised (see Villarroel et al 2018) by their incorporation of the following characteristics:

Realism  – that is the presence of a ‘real context’ that describes and delivers a frame for the task or problem to be solved. 

• just as with most real-world problems, there may be no one right answer
• outcomes should, ideally, be those likely to be encountered in a ‘real-world’ context, such as a presentation, report, website or product.

Cognitive challenge  – they require learners to draw on their higher level cognitive skills through problem solving and the creative application of knowledge to novel contexts. Such approaches challenge students to integrate new ideas with prior knowledge, apply theory to practice, engage in thoughtful analysis, evaluation and decision-making, and solve novel problems. 

Evaluative judgement  – they require students to:

• determine what information and skills are relevant and how they should be used
• engage with creating and using feedback to help them improve their understanding of quality and to self-regulate their own work.

Why make assessment ‘authentic’?

Three key drivers for integrating authentic assessment into our curricular are that:

• it is an approach to assessment that both develops, and tests, student learning
• students want it
• student world readiness, employability and inclusion.

Click through each of the sections below to learn more.

Authenticity has been identified as a key characteristic of assessment design which promotes learning (Villarroel et al 2017). In part, this is because authentic assessments focus as much, if not more, on engaging students in a learning process, than they do the final product. As such, they are an example of assessment FOR learning, whereby assessment and teaching are intertwined, rather than simply assessment OF learning.   

The focus on developing students’ evaluative judgement in authentic assessment is a key part of such assessment for learning. For example, engaging students with evaluating their own and others’ skills, and with creating and using feedback, can contribute to students’ feedback literacy (Carless & Boud 2018). Additionally, Authentic Assessment can help students engage productively in the kinds of feedback practices they may encounter during their studies and after they graduate (Dawson et al, 2021).

There is good evidence that integrating well designed and thought provoking authentic assessments within curriculum design will result in greater student satisfaction in the short term and better graduate employability in the long term (James and Casidy 2018). 

The focus on developing students' evaluative judgement foregrounds providing and engaging students with feedback, which is also something our students tell us they want more of.

“All students, regardless of location, situation, programme or mode of study, should have equitable access to opportunities to enhance their employability, make successful transitions and manage their career” (Advance HE, 2019).

Including authentic assessment in your curriculum, as part of a wider strategy of embedding employability and Universal Design for Learning, will help to equip your students with a range of specialist and transferable skills and provides an inclusive approach to enabling them to identify and achieve their aspirations.

World Readiness

“Assessment can be a powerful force in shaping individual students’ identity and sense of self-worth….it’s about who they are and who they go on to be in our society” (McArthur, 2021)

The social, economic and environmental problems facing society will require creative and flexible minds able to engage with such complex (‘wicked’) problems and offer inclusive solutions (MacArthur 2021). Authentic assessments can mirror the world as it is, but can also push the possibilities of what the world could be by helping students to make connections between knowledge learned and how that knowledge might be later applied.  This might be within existing structures, systems and workplaces, or those that will replace them. Those your students will be responsible for shaping.

Employability

Authentic assessment can help to enhance student employability. It has been found to have a positive impact on basic skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication skills and teamwork (Singh, Thambusamy, and Ramly 2014) and on student learning, autonomy, motivation, self-regulation and metacognition (Villarroel et al 2017), all abilities highly related to employability in any sector (including academia).

As noted above, because the outcomes of authentic assessments should, ideally, be those likely to be encountered in a ‘real-world’ context, they can be designed to provide opportunities for students to curate experiences and outputs they can draw on in job applications and career development (Advance HE, 2021; Blaj-Ward and Matič, 2020). 

Although our students have access to a wide range of extra-curricular opportunities to enhance their employability, the only opportunities we can be confident are available to and accessible by ALL are those embedded within the curriculum.  Thus, inclusion is another key driver for including more experiential learning and authentic assessments in the curriculum.

For example, by offering students flexibility through a choice of ‘real-world’ topics or outputs we can enable them to meet learning outcomes in a personally meaningful way, i.e. tailored to their lived experience or future aspirations. 

There are many ways you can go about making your assessments more 'authentic'. 

Get inspired!

Open the list below to explore a range of assessment outcomes that might, individually or in combination, form part of an authentic assessment. You will also find links to case studies or journal articles in which such approaches are exemplified.  As you will see, many of the examples given below can be adapted to a number of assessment modes (such as individual or group tasks, as parts of portfolios or as stand alone assessments).

If you would like to incorporate a new assessment, but aren't sure where to start, or would just like to talk your ideas through, please contact your Academic Developer, who will be happy to advise.

Some examples of authentic assessment include:

• Tests:  Exam questions and MCQs can be adapted to be more ‘authentic’ by presenting a real world context or framing of the problem to be solved.  See this 2020 paper by Villarroel   which explores how the advantages of authenticity in assessment can be applied within the ‘testing’ approach to assessment. See also the guidance on this site on writing  MCQ Assessments . 
• Project work:  Individual or group project responding to a real world brief, possibly set by employers. See, for example, the  Physics Team Project  approach at Durham University, the University of Liverpool  real world client led projects for Maths students , or the Sussex Informatics  Global Design Challenge  which uses briefs set by the NGO Engineers without Borders. 
• Presentations:  Both in-person and online recorded presentations are used during graduate recruitment and in the workplace. Such assessment tasks might form part of a  mini conference  attended by employers from a range of sectors, or be more formative in nature, whereby students assess and feed back on one another. E.g. see the example given by Pitt (University of Kent) in his November 2020 DARE seminar (example is between   minutes 27 - 30 of the recording ) 
• Essays:  Make such tasks more authentic by explicitly situating them in the social world and in relation to issues of social justice. See the example English Literature example provided in  McArthur (2022)  Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society , and in Forsyth and Evans (2018)  Authentic assessment for a more inclusive history . You might also draw on authentic assessment principles to develop creative and academic writing skills. See this 2021, blog post by Garnham on an  authentic, creative and active essay writing assessment .
• Funding applications:  For a research grant, students can explain what study could be done to explore their chosen gap in the literature, or a project funding applications for an NGO. Better still, (as suggested by  Burns 2018 ) students could review an actual grant proposal, or each other’s proposals, and decide if they should be funded and why.  See also the   Conservation in Practice case study  in the Embedding Employability Toolkit Canvas site. 
• Policy briefings or reports:  A formal, structured, and professional presentation, on paper and/or verbally, of a proposal. Students use expertise from their discipline to make recommendations to a specialised target audience, who will already have an understanding of the problem.  Asking students to respond to live/real-world consultations will make such tasks even more authentic. For example see Smith’s (2020)   Students as professionals: The audit experience .
• Consultancy evidence gathering and reporting:  Develop practical field, laboratory and computing and reporting skills by asking students to complete consultancy reports that mimic real-life practices carried out by professionals. See, for example, the  three approaches to consultancy-led assessment  in Geography and Environmental Science at The University of Liverpool.
• Reflection:  Include in your assessments a requirement for students to reflect upon what they have learnt from applying theory to a real world situation/experience and how this learning has informed the way they will act in the future, e.g. see Wiewiora & Kowalkiewicz (2019)  The role of authentic assessment in developing authentic leadership identity and competencies  
• Blog post, website, wiki or newspaper article:  Creates a potentially public/sharable resource students can link to in job applications. For example, see the 2010 chapter by Shanks (pp 39-46) ' Using blog posts for peer to peer learning and summative assessment . See also  Authentic assessments: using Wikipedia in the University classroom .
• Posters:  E.g. a poster conference, where each group summarises a key paper in your field in the form of a poster and applies a rubric to assess each other’s contributions.  
• Self assessment, peer assessment & peer review:  Embed opportunities for students to apply marking criteria to their own or others’ work, including giving and receiving feedback, at the draft or proposal stage and/or in response to the final output (e.g. feedback on a presentation). This will help to develop your students’ evaluative judgement (Boud & Ajjawi 2019;  Tai et al, 2017 ) and feedback literacy ( Carless & Boud 2018   ). 

You will also find a wealth of ideas in the Kay Sambell and Sally Brown Covid-19 Assessment Collection.  Note, in particular, the 'Authentic assessment compendiums' (at least three) which showcase ways to design authentic assessment tasks, including LOTS of examples, alongside their more traditional counterparts. 

Review your existing assessment:

Assess the ‘authenticity’ of your course or module assessments using the questions below.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• do my assessment tasks have real-world relevance?
• are my assessment tasks seamlessly integrated with situations that reflect real world scenarios?
• are my assessment outcomes recognised as authentic by both students and employers?

Cognitive Challenge

Explore the following questions:

• do assessments challenge students to engage in problem solving?
• do my assessment tasks provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different perspectives, using a variety of resources?
• do my assessments challenge students to creatively apply their knowledge to novel contexts?

Evaluative Judgment:

On evaluative judgement, it is important to ask:

• do my assessment tasks provide the opportunity to collaborate?
• do my assessment tasks allow competing solutions and diversity of outcomes?
• do my assessment tasks provide the opportunity to engage in critical reflection and self-evaluation?

(After: Sridharan & Mustard (2015), Ashford-Rowe et al (2013) & Villarroel et al (2018).

Please note that this checklist is simply a tool for reflecting on your assessment practices. Your assessment doesn’t need to meet all of these criteria for it to be considered ‘authentic’ or valuable. 

Hopefully, this checklist, and the examples of authentic assessments provided above, will help identify existing assessments which fit the authentic assessment model. Or, there may be some that, with a little bit of tweaking or re-framing of the tasks, could easily be made more ‘authentic’. 

Build in authentic assessments:

As noted above, authentic assessment models emphasise assessment FOR learning. So, if you’re keen to develop and embed new authentic assessments, it’s necessary, therefore, to plan how you will integrate them into your module delivery.  There’s no denying this can be time consuming. However, it is also an opportunity to get creative and try something new and, maybe, kill a few birds (institutional targets) with one stone. 

The model below provides a stage-based process for building authentic assessments in higher education. Adapted from Villarroell et al (2018) the model is rooted in the principle of constructive alignment, whereby the assessment is designed to support the student in constructing relevant learning through alignment between the learning outcomes, the teaching methods and the assessment. 

Click through the sections below to learn more about each step.

Reflect on the following questions in order to map out how your module(s) and assessment can contribute to developing your students’ academic and transferable skills. Ask yourself:

• how does my subject connect and contribute to achieving the competences of the graduation profile that this programme is committed to develop in students?
• how is the knowledge and skills learned in my subject related to the typical problems faced by society and/or by professionals in the world of work?

This is your opportunity to get creative. Working with employers to devise tasks is a great way to identify a context or problem and identify a task and outcome that has real-world relevance (see the examples provided above also). However, while realism in authentic assessments is important, using simulations of real-world situations is absolutely fine. Whatever context you choose, it should urge your students to make decisions about what they need to do. In this way, Villareoll et al (2018) suggest, it is not a matter of the student reproducing course content but of discriminating what areas of their learning are needed to answer the question, be it in a multiple choice test or an extended group project.

For inspiration see:

• Sally Brown and Kay Samball’s six steps towards designing more authentic assessments in their March 2021 compendium of examples of authentic assessment in practice from diverse disciplines
• The Active Learning Network. An Active Learning approach is one where, rather than your role being one of transmitting knowledge, you engage your students in activities, such as reading, writing, discussion, or problem solving, to promote analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content. Cooperative learning, problem-based learning, and the use of case methods and simulations are some approaches that promote active learning
• Contextualise your questions within ‘wicked’ problems which have no simple answer or one-size-fits-all solutions, but require insight and collaboration from all areas of society, and impact on all workplaces. For more see the Advance HE Practice Guides for Education for Sustainable Development.
• See also the links to examples, papers and case studies provided in the Examples of Authentic Assessment section of this resource.

Steps three and four of developing your authentic assessment is to consider how to embed guidance and feedback loops which will enable students to both improve their learning and develop evaluative judgement.

It is important here to identify how and when you will provide opportunities for your students to engage with and reflect on the course or module ILOs, the assessment tasks and your marking criteria. This could be via discussion or via feedback on one or more contributory or non-contributory formative assessments.

Embedding opportunities to give and receive feedback will also help your students to understand the purposes of the assessment task and to reflect on, and improve, their own work. At the same time you will contribute to developing your students’ feedback literacy (their ability to interpret and apply feedback) and confidence in seeking and constructively applying feedback - all vital skills for lifelong learning.

Things to think about before changing your assessments. Click the headings below to learn more.

Students should be provided with guidance and support in tackling any kind of assessment. The same goes for authentic assessment tasks.  Indeed, the more ‘authentic’ your assessment task, the more it will engage students in new ways of applying and reflecting on their knowledge and skills, and the more guidance and support you will need to provide.

We recommend therefore that you:

• discuss with your students how your ILOs constructively align with the assessment tasks. Identify why and how the assessment will develop their practical and academic skills; emphasise where they might be applied, e.g. in other modules or in the workplace, and how your students might use their work to evidence skills to employers
• make use of your module Canvas site. Provide clear guidance and, where possible, exemplars to (a) show your students what is being assessed (b) Manage your marking workload (c) ensure consistency among markers. Students should have no ambiguity in where to focus their efforts as a result of reading the rubric. Also, consider how you might use your rubrics as a teaching tool, to help engage your students develop their evaluative judgement.

In addition to ensuring constructive alignment between your ILOS and module assessments, ensure you also consider:

• module changes: You may need to submit change requests, for example if you want to change a presentation (PRE) to a portfolio (POF)
• equivalencies: When adding new forms of assessment outcomes, e.g. a video, written or audio submission, providing students with a suggested word count is standard practice. This should be supplemented with equivalent length/volume of other mediums. See page 5 of Don’t Panic: The Hitch-hiker's Guide to Alternative Assessment [PDF 862KB] by Damian Gordon for one such suggested table.

Ashford-Rowe, Herrington J. & Brown, .  (2014)   Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment,   Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education,  39:2,   205-222.

Burns, V. (2018)  MicroCPD: Authentic Assessment. University of Birmingham Higher Education Futures Institute. Posted online on 15 Jan 2018.

Carless, D. & Boud , D. (2018) The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback , Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43:8.

Dawson, P.,  Carless, D. & Pui Wah Lee, P. (2021) Authentic feedback: supporting learners to engage in disciplinary feedback practices , Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46:2, 286-296.

Lincoln Then, J. & Casidy, R. (2018) Authentic Assessment in Business Education: its Effects on Student Satisfaction and Promoting Behaviour . Studies in Higher Education 43 (3): 401–15.

McArthur, J. (2021, 18/07/2021).  Rethinking student involvement in assessment . Centre for Global Higher Education working paper series. Working Paper no. 58, February 2021. 

McArthur, J. (2022)  Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society.  Higher Education (online)

Jorre de St Jorre, T. & Oliver, B. (2018) Want students to engage? Contextualise graduate learning outcomes and assess for employability, Higher Education Research & Development, 37:1, 44-57.

Mitchell, J. E., Nyamapfene, A., Roach, K. & Tilley, E. (2021) Faculty wide curriculum reform: the integrated engineering programme,  European Journal of Engineering Education, 46:1, 48-66.

Sridharan, B. & Mustard, J. (2015)  Authentic Assessment Methods: A Practical Handbook for Teaching Staff Part-I . Deakin University Faculty of Business and Law. 

Tai, J., Ajjawi, R., Boud, D. et al. (2018)  Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work.  Higher Education  76,  467–481

Villarroel, V.,  Bloxham, S., Bruna, D.,  Bruna C. & Herrera-Seda, C.  (2018) Authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design , Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43:5, 840-854.

Wiewiora, A. & Kowalkiewicz, A. (2019) The role of authentic assessment in developing authentic leadership identity and competencies,  Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44:3, 415-430.

See more from Assessment design

Buying essays: how to make sure assessment is authentic

Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Teaching, Learning & Equity), University of Technology Sydney

Disclosure statement

Shirley Alexander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Technology Sydney provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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The essay, as the primary form of assessment, should be dead. This is the kind of comment that terrifies academics everywhere – but it is an idea that I think we all need to consider. The “news” that there are cheating factories which have penetrated universities in Australia was not news to anyone in academia.

Universities have complex processes to discover when students cheat. They apply those processes to a range of assessments, particularly to discover plagiarism. However, there is a clear answer if universities want to ensure that all students do their own work – and that’s by changing to what educators call authentic assessment .

Assessment should mirror real life

Current methods of assessment do not mirror real life. When, for instance, in one’s real life does one ever have to write an essay, unless you happen to be an academic? And when in our working lives do we ever sit for exams – particularly the kinds of exams that are closed-book and require memorisation of content for the purposes of reproduction?

Even those exams that I would describe as better – those that allow students to take in their notes and annotated textbooks – don’t allow those sitting the exam to search the internet and online databases. In real life, no matter how much pressure we are under, we get to search the internet for better, more particular knowledge. More contentious is the idea of “phoning a friend” to get ideas.

A very small minority of students are using more and more sophisticated methods of cheating. That includes paying ghost writers, which effectively outsources the learning. Pity the employer who must rely on those people who never effectively learnt how to do the task themselves.

With the kinds of assessments universities have now, it is becoming increasingly difficult to detect that kind of cheating, unless of course the student refuses to pay the ghost writer, who then promptly informs the university of their role in the student’s success.

Biometric scanning, of course, will eventually sort out the students who get someone else to sit the exam. But I think that kind of cheating is still very unusual. So what’s the real challenge?

In many respects, my university (the University of Technology, Sydney) is already on the way. Academics are increasingly ditching lectures in favour of a learning model that engages students in what we call “high-touch” , face-to-face learning experiences. That means students want to be part of the learning activities that the university offers. And now the challenge is to replace standard assessments in the same way.

The alternative to exams and essays

Prospective employers want to know exactly what graduates can do and, as part of the selection and interview process, increasingly ask applicants to complete the kinds of tasks they might be expected to perform in the role they are applying for, including the ability to work as part of a team.

Universities need to mirror this to prepare students for the workplace. Some examples of real-world tasks that have been introduced at UTS include:

Students in health are engaged in caring for patients as early as first year under the supervision of trained clinicians;

Architecture students work with real clients to develop plans, costings and council submissions;

Engineering students design and build for real projects;

Journalism students investigate, report and deliver stories across a range of platforms and external partners then publish those same stories; and

Law students enter moots and volunteer in non-profit organisations.

The benefit of this kind of assessment is that it includes all stakeholders – and that means future employers.

Universities are in the midst of significant change in moving to this new approach to assessment. When they get there, students will not only have a higher-quality learning experience, but they will be even better prepared for the kinds of complex tasks and roles they will undertake. And, of course, cheating will be non-existent.

That’s the path to authentic assessment.

Read more of The Conversation’s coverage of Academic dishonesty in Australia here.

• Academic dishonesty in Australia

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What Is Authentic Assessment?

Classroom learning isn’t just restricted to scoring well on exams or getting good grades. Now, teachers adopt new and improved…

Classroom learning isn’t just restricted to scoring well on exams or getting good grades. Now, teachers adopt new and improved learning and assessment techniques to keep students engaged. One such technique is authentic assessment.

Authentic assessment is a way of assessing students’ learning that doesn’t use standardized tests or checklists. Instead, teachers use assessments to see how well students understand specific topics, but also how they can apply their understanding to different scenarios and problems.

It’s a way to assess students and give feedback that isn’t just subjective but draws on actual evidence. It places more emphasis on the process of learning, instead of just getting a passing grade. Teachers are able to give meaningful feedback to students in an engaging manner.

Why Is Authentic Assessment Important?

Authentic assessment in continuous learning, examples of authentic assessment.

Authentic assessment is a method that attempts to measure how well students can apply their knowledge in different scenarios. To achieve this, the teacher must create tasks and assignments that mimic a real-world environment.

Let’s look at some features that illustrate the meaning of authentic assessment:

It emphasizes learning and understanding concepts. This method is focused on students’ thought processes and the way they communicate what they’ve learned

It also provides a more complete approach for teachers to assess and critique students’ performances. Teachers provide a score, but they must explain why they give that score

Students aren’t put under pressure to memorize massive quantities of information and reproduce it in a timed written exam. The assessment is often related to the work itself

Here are some examples of what that might look like in real life:

Assignments that require solving problems and getting creative are often used in authentic assessment. For instance, if you’re teaching a publishing course, learners can produce a volume using self-publishing tools

Students can work on projects in the area they aim to impact. So, students of social work can organize a self-help group for women in rural areas and track their performance over a period of time

Simulations that mimic a real-life scenario can test learning. For instance, first responders might have to rescue survivors for a mock emergency to measure their effectiveness under pressure

From these examples, it’s clear that authentic assessment can be a part of any progressive learning environment.

Critics of authentic assessment argue that there’s no way to standardize these more qualitative tests. It may be tougher for teachers to be objective about their students’ work when they’re placing an emphasis on the process.

However, the true meaning of authentic assessment allows teachers to create a space where students feel more comfortable to share their knowledge and engage with other students.

Teachers and students can get more results from authentic assessment than traditional standardized testing because it emphasizes the actual process of learning instead of just checking off material students learned from textbooks. It ensures learners have absorbed the information and can use it as needed.

Experts working in continuous learning and online education often emphasize the importance of authentic assessment to make the learning process richer and more engaging. It’s an efficient way to check if students understand not only basic concepts but also how they can apply them in different situations and scenarios.

This method provides an environment where students can share their ideas and understanding with others. Authentic assessment allows students to find a place in the class with more meaning and less pressure from teachers.

Authentic assessment can help employees improve their performance, gain confidence and learn more skills. Let’s tackle a few more examples of authentic assessment in the professional sphere.

In medicine, authentic assessment provides students with deeper learning. Students can find out more about clinical rotations and do assessments that’ll give them a better understanding of what they’re going to do in real-life scenarios.

Law professors can create scenarios where students must use their law knowledge and apply it to different and challenging situations, such as a mock trial.

Continuing education for employees often involves role-playing or project work. For instance, if your marketing team is working on its communication skills, they can stage presentations and pitches to show their progress. ( https://www.jonesaroundtheworld.com/ )

By recreating a practical setting, students need to respond in real-time with real stressors. This kind of assessment has actual value beyond book knowledge.

The education space is changing all the time and Harappa understands the need to teach the teachers too. That’s why it brings you the Inspiring Faculty Program . Designed to help experienced faculty improve their skills and stay on top of new techniques, the program helps teachers understand the cohort, build trust and inspire a culture of lifelong learning. Our program offers curated learning pathways for your faculty. Choose the one that serves your needs and help your faculty become the glue that binds the student body together. Power up your faculty today!

Explore Harappa Diaries to learn more about topics such as The Three Domains Of  Bloom’s Taxonomy ,  Levels Of Bloom's Taxonomy  and Types Of  Student-Centric Teaching Methods  that will help organizations and institutions tap into people's potential.