Page 179 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

John Mueller describes authentic assessment as:
A form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills. 200 Jon Mueller
In this resource, the term authentic assessment expands on Mueller’s definition by describing it as the ability of the learner, educator and the learner’s peers to apply effective questioning techniques, when interrogating the learner’s understanding and creativity, and capture that understanding creatively using a range of rich media formats. The express purpose of creating multi-media assessment items is to drive the learning deeper by having the learner and their learner’s peers conference the learning and their own assessment item(s) with the educator.
The outcome of authentic assessment tasks is that they provide learners with practical feedback on their learning journey, and increase the depth of their understanding of the underlying concepts and concept frameworks. Authentic assessment also fulfils Jon Mueller’s definition in that the feedback provided to the learner by educators, peers, parents and other ‘de facto’ educators, also drives the learning to a point where the learner(s) can creatively apply that understanding to real-world contexts, and continue to be innovative and ingenious.
Testing knowledge as the end-point of learning places the learning horizon at the learner’s feet, and what we want to do is expand that horizon to the curvature of their world, by making use of the richness of their imagination and leveraging understanding creatively.
Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America - from kindergarten through sixth grade - for whom the decline is “most serious”201. Bronson & Merryman (Newsweek 2016)
We need to ensure that assessment does not stop at understanding but extends to all the creative aspects of learning. By providing rich feedback from numerous sources, learners gain assistance in understanding what the next learning steps are and understand and which areas they need to develop further, as well as providing them with clarity as to the level they are operating at. Authentic assessment goes hand in hand with the belief that assessment is primarily a tool for developing the learner’s conceptual capability, as opposed to primarily focusing on benchmarking a learner’s or a school’s success, or lack thereof, in a purely summative sense.
Authentic assessment does not exclude the use of traditional assessment techniques, but rather it compliments and builds on them. However, politician’s eyes seem to be transfixed on league tables, based on simplistic, low-level testing, that simply reduces educators to ‘delivering’ a 20th century curriculum in the 21st century. Learning then becomes a matter of successfully jumping over or crawling under a series of test and examination hurdles, based on how much they can remember. The result of this focus is that educators teach to the formal exam or test, learners realise that knowing is everything and that in the name of efficiency, understanding and creativity is marginalised and chased to the periphery of the learning experience.
200 Meuller, J. (2006). Authentic Assessment Toolbox: What is Authentic Assessment? Retrieved from http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whatisit.htm
201 Bronson P. & Merryman B. (2016) Newsweek- The Creativity Crisis. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/creativity-crisis-74665
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