LE11

Welcome to Learning Event 11 🎯

Designing Authentic Assessments 🌟

Learning Event 11 focuses on creating assessments that reflect real-world tasks and encourage students to apply their knowledge and skills in practical ways. Authentic assessments prioritize creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving, enabling students to connect learning to real-life contexts.

Why It Matters

Traditional assessments often emphasize rote memorization and recall, which may not prepare students for real-world challenges. Authentic assessments, in contrast, allow students to:

Apply what they’ve learned to meaningful, real-world problems.
Demonstrate higher-order thinking and creativity.
Develop transferable skills that benefit them in their personal and professional lives.

Focus

Authentic Assessment:
Assessments designed to mirror tasks students might encounter in their careers or daily lives, promoting the application of skills and knowledge in real-world contexts.

Key Concepts:

Aligning Assessments with Objectives:
Ensure assessments directly measure course learning objectives.
Incorporating Real-World Scenarios:
Design tasks that reflect genuine challenges and environments students may face.
Differentiating Traditional vs. Authentic Assessments:
- Traditional: Multiple-choice tests, true/false quizzes.
- Authentic: Case studies, project-based tasks, role-playing scenarios.

READ 📖

Assessing Authentically – UNSW Sydney
“Authentic assessment helps students contextualise their learning and to see how real-life conditions or situations, in all their unpredictability, ambiguity and complexity, affect their theoretical knowledge.”
Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society – McArthur, 2022
“I suggest we move from simply focusing on the authentic task to considering why that task matters?.”
A Step-by-step Guide to Designing More Authentic Assessments – Brown & Sambell
“If we want to inspire student learning, authentic assessment is one of the most practical tools we have in our teaching toolbox..”

WATCH 🎥

Keeping Assessment Relevant and "Authentic" (3:52)
Understanding Different Types of Assessments (17:08)
Assessing Deeper Understanding by Engaging in Authentic Assessment (23:23)

DISCUSS 💬

How can authentic assessments help students connect course content to real-world challenges? What strategies have you used to design authentic assessments?

DO ✍️

Create a Project-Based Authentic Assessment

Steps:

Identify a key learning objective from your course.
Develop a real-world task or problem that aligns with this objective.
Define clear success criteria for the task.
Incorporate opportunities for creativity and critical thinking.

Self-Check:

Does the assessment reflect a real-world challenge?
Are the criteria and expectations clear and transparent?
How does the task encourage higher-order thinking skills?

We’d love to hear about the authentic assessments you designed as part of this Learning Event. Email us at hello@digitallyliterate.net to share your experiences!