Aromatawai Tūturu

“We propose moving strongly away from traditional exams’ inflexibility towards more authentic, (Villarroel et al., 2018) life-relevant tasks that foster self-regulation, present high order cognitive challenges rather than measuring low order thinking skills in a decontextualised way (Villarroel et al., 2020), and place as much emphasis on process as on outcome.“ (Brown & Sambell, 2020)

On this page

• Why incorporate authentic experiential assessment into your programme/course?
• What does authentic assessment look like?
• How can we design more authentic assessment?
• What might work better? Examples of alternative assessments
• Scalability: Authentic assessment with large classes
• Strategic links
• Useful tools

Why incorporate authentic experiential assessment into your programme/course?

Traditional exams and tests generally focus on measuring students’ ability to remember and record course content. The deep thinking, problem-solving, transferrable skills and ethical attitudes called upon in real life are those we need to focus on in making assessment more meaningful and more authentic.

The new directions set out by the Curriculum Framework Transformation project, Taumata Teitei and refreshed Graduate Profile all indicate a need to review our assessment approaches and design in terms of greater relevance and impact, capability development, and enhanced student experience. Designing more authentic assessments can help prepare students for lifelong learning and their role in the world, and to develop community engagement, cultural identity, social justice, and sustainable practices as civic duty. Making assessment tasks personal and meaningful, and providing elements of student choice, also ties in with the University’s goal of more relational forms of learning.

Bearmann et al. (2020) also identify that many assessment designers still do not take advantage of digital opportunities. Their chapter in Re-imagining University Assessment in a digital world asks, “how can assessments support living and working in a digital era, with its networked and rapid access to both people and information?” They discuss how online assignments (such as writing a blog, creating a portfolio, or constructing different digital personas to portray professional skills in a range of digital environments) can help students to build effective skills for self-presentation online—all essential skills for the workplace.

In our Introduction to this resource ‘Why rethink assessment?’ we quote Lucas, Rapanta et al. and others on the need to realign assessment with pedagogy and the skills students need for the modern world. Lucas identifies some common themes in reviews of ‘high quality assessment’ including authenticity:

• Increasing interest in strengths-based approaches, especially from employers.
• The need to design better performance-based assessments.
• A move towards scenario-based, authentic assessment.
• A move towards assessments of investigations over longer time periods.
• Some interest in assessment on demand.
• Increased opportunities for student involvement and agency in the process. (Lucas, p. 22)

We need to ask:

1. What are we assessing? Are we assessing for learning, and are we capturing what employers look for in a graduate?
2. Does this assessment activity have relevance and encourage student involvement and agency?

What does authentic assessment look like?

Authentic assessment uses and applies knowledge and skills in real-world experiences or plausible situations. For example, as well as being realistic, the assessment might replicate or simulate the context in which adults are tested in the workplace, civic, or personal life.

The University of Western Sydney has an excellent resource on teaching challenges, which includes a reading on Authentic contexts.

“An authentic context is an essential component of an authentic learning task because students need to ‘buy in’ to the scenario or context that you wish students to engage in. It is important to create a context that reflects real-world complexity and that is as authentic as possible so as to encourage your students to immerse themselves in the problem space. An authentic context will typically pose a problem that can end up having various solutions.

The context does not have to be delivered using sophisticated technologies. The most important feature is its fidelity to real-world problems rather than a high-fidelity approximation of the real world.” (Western Sydney University, n.d.)

How can we design more authentic assessments?

1. Change the nature of the questions used in written assessment. Incorporate scenarios that are more realistic and relevant to students, self, and community to encourage agency and belonging.
2. Encourage a cognitive challenge (possible social, cultural or sustainable) that requires evaluative judgement to practice problem solving and synthesis.
3. Embed strengths-based approaches by identifying graduate capabilities that can be observed or measured.
4. Encourage social, environmental, and community engagement in tasks or activities to build towards and complete assessment artefacts.

Brown and Sambell (2020) point out that focusing more on coursework that is “fully explained to students with ample opportunity for learners to study appropriately and prepare” is also likely to result in greater student engagement and responsibility for their own learning, and therefore ongoing development and lifelong learning (p. 2).

Acknowledging that in-course assessment may take more time to design than an exam, they have created a helpful, simplified ‘task generator’ to help with transforming assessment to be more authentic.

From (Brown & Sambell, 2020)

What might work better? Examples of alternative assessments

Three alternatives to traditional exam questions (from Brown & Sambell). More examples are included in the JISC report.

Scalability: Authentic assessment with large classes

Large cohorts and mixed-mode groups in a single Canvas course can present challenges when it comes to managing engagement, community, interactivity and assessment. Offering choice and making assessment tasks authentic will help in immersing students in problem-solving and making them feel their efforts are relevant to their personal development in life.

Making use of a peer review process with sections/groups of students can provide more feedback than a single lecturer is able to offer and help to build that sense of community. For more information, see collaborative and peer assessment.

For formative assessment tasks, platforms that offer self-marking and automated feedback can be an option to reduce marking workload for large classes. For example, H5P offers content types that can be used to present tasks in scenarios, such as interactive videos where you can pose questions at particular points (e.g., predict what will happen next); or branching scenarios that require decision making and problem solving on the part of the student, which then flows on to different pathways based on their choices. These take some investment in time and effort to create, but if designed with long-term sustainability in mind, can be used iteratively as engaging online activities that can save on marking workload.