Authentic Assessment - Review Of Literature

Part A A Review of the Literature on Authentic Assessment Introduction As with all forms of educational assessment, authentic assessment is appreciated by some and considered problematic by others. Assessment has long been an integral aspect of education. It serves to provide teachers, students and parents with a means to see the progress of students; what they have learned, how well they have learned it and guidelines for the teacher to facilitate their future progress. Authentic assessment is also known as performance assessment, appropriate, direct or alternative assessment. Schuman (1992) agrees that this type of assessment can provide a more realistic and comprehensive means of assessing students. “Authentic evaluation can provide more information than any multiple-choice test possibly could. As they promote the thinking curriculum everyone wants for children, authentic evaluations will provide genuine accountability.” Definition of Terms It is useful here to provide a definition of some of the terms that will be used in this literature review. 1. Assessment: The term assessment is applied to a wide range of methods by which information about students is gathered and appraised, including formal testing and analysis. Gathering information about children as a result of day-to-day informal interactions is part of teaching and is equally a part of assessment (Humphrey 1991).

The following terms are taken from the research by Dr. Hugh Baird 1 2. Evaluation: This is a process of comparing students with other students or with a predetermined standard. It is also a process that is used to rank students. Evaluation which measures student learning in order to identify how well they are learning or how much of the subject matter they have mastered in order to help them learn more or to help the teacher to improve ongoing instruction is formative. Evaluation which tests students' performance to determine students' final overall assimilation of course material and/or overall instructional method effectiveness is summative. 3. Norm-referenced Evaluation: Norm-referenced evaluation is evaluation based on a comparison of a student's performance with one or more other student's performance on the same test. 4. Criterion-referenced evaluation is evaluation based on a comparison of a student's performance with a preset performance standard which is determined independently of the test, or test scores. 5. Validity: The validity of a test may be defined as the degree to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure. Since validity is a matter of degree, it is incorrect to say that a test is either valid or invalid. All tests have some degree of validity for any purpose for which they are used; however, some are much more valid than others. 6. Reliability: Reliability refers to the consistency of test results. 1

These definitions are taken from the following document; Hugh Baird. (1997). “Performance Assessment for Science Teachers”. Utah State Office of Education. The document can be found at: http://www.usoe.k12.ut.us/curr/science/Perform/Past1.htm

7. Rating Scale: Typically, a rating scale consists of a set of characteristics or qualities to be judged and some type of scale for indicating the degree to which each characteristic is present. The rating scale itself is merely a reporting device. A General Review of The Literature on Authentic Assessment Previously, students were primarily assessed using standardized testing – tests which provided students with questions that demanded a choice of either a right or wrong answer. But, like all facets of society, education too must change and this process has already begun with authentic assessment. According to Robertson and Valentine (2000), authentic assessment is a means to assess all students even those with special needs. It is more learner-centered and thus it improves not only student learning but program and instructor effectiveness. “Authentic assessment refers to evaluation that makes use of real life tasks instead of contrived test items.” The role of assessment is seen in a much broader context than simply giving a student a test and waiting to see if they can provide the right answers. In this context, assessment is a tool which employs the use of real-life tasks and will, in turn drive education in a much different direction. The use of standardized testing implied that teachers would often have to teach for the test. That is, teacher instruction and the curriculum would be designed specifically to teach students the facts or information that would be covered on their various tests throughout the year. This leads one to the conclusion that education in such a context would be fact driven – providing students with facts to learn, perhaps even memorize. Ultimately, they would know what facts they were required to know – those that would be covered on the test.

The concern here is that teaching students in this fashion and testing them in this way does not really provide them with any chance for creativity, nor does it measure them effectively. “The current movement toward authentic assessment grows out of concern that standardized tests do not accurately measure how well students can think and solve problems, what subjects they know in-depth, or how responsible they are for directing their own learning” (Allen 1993). Another reason for moving towards authentic assessment has been the concern that standardized tests merely determine how well one student is doing in comparison to another. P. Johnston (1992) opines that this information has no real value in the educational system. “What we should be interested in is whether each child is growing, not whether he is better than the child next to him or a child across the district or the country […] evaluating a child’s progress is instructionally useful and comparing to him or her to someone else is not.” Craig and McCormick (2002) point out that standardized tests have been criticized for years due to the fact that “[…] research has proven testing not to be an effective measure of student learning […].” According to these researchers (Ibid), the primary failure of standardized testing is that it addresses the question “which child knows more?” Authentic assessment addresses the question, “how much does my child know?” These two authors are not alone in their critique of standardized testing. Much of the literature on authentic assessment focuses on the failure of standardized testing to provide students, teachers, parents or even the educational system with information that is truly relevant or helpful in any fashion.