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Authentic assessment requires five driving forces to fully represent learner capability
1. There needs to be a national approach to assessing learner capacity based on an authentic assessment process.
2. Parents/caregivers, employers, universities, and the general community need to be informed on the purpose of assessment and how it is carried out authentically.
3. “What is tested is what is learned.” Hence any testing procedures or processes must
reflect what an education system wants to be learned, understood and creatively applied
within the compulsory schooling system.
4. A realisation that learners can learn without necessarily being taught via direct
instruction by teachers. If our quest is developing ‘independent lifelong learners’, then
we must increasingly build the learner’s agency over their own learning, to achieve this.
5. Assessment must extend to the quantitative and qualitative assessment of creativity,
innovation and ingenuity.
There are also a range of tools that education systems can make use of and promote to assist the uptake of authentic assessment and the successful application of the Learning Process:
• An effective cognitive taxonomy that focuses on developing surface, deep and profound levels of understanding (the SOLO Taxonomy), followed via the creative application of the understanding achieved.
• The use of a wide range of media and multimedia formats to increase the authenticity of the reporting. The use of video is a powerful mechanism for reporting, as much of the nuance of learning can only be captured using video assessments. The learner’s enthusiasm, ability to communicate orally, their creativity and the depth of their understanding is far more authentically reported via rich media than can ever be achieved via written assessments. Video of learners also overcomes the learner’s potential limitations in interpreting and using text to describe their understanding.
• Sophisticated, self-reflective, metacognitive assessment, self-reporting, peer commentaries and a showcase of a learner’s capability can all be powerful indicators of the learner’s ability to build the necessary understandings, capabilities and skills that will empower them to make the most of the world they will inherit.
Art Costa sums up the purpose of assessment best in the foreword to the resource ‘Expansive Education’ by Bill Lucas, Guy Claxton and Ellen Spencer.
We must constantly remind ourselves of the ultimate purpose of evaluation is to have students learn to become self-evaluative. If students graduate from our schools still dependent upon others to tell them whether they are adequate, good or excellent, then we’ve missed the whole point of what education is about. Reframing society, however, is no easy task, Peter Medawar, British biologist, said, the human mind treats a new idea in the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it. Trying to change the views of parents, politicians and educators and their subsequent behaviour and language, even with the best possible justification, will necessarily generate in them discomfort.202 ArtCosta
Once again, this capacity to have the ‘end in mind’ but also being open to challenge, is critical to long term success. We must also be willing to apply new ideas and concepts, but only if they enhance the desired outcomes that have been identified. The outcomes we desire may also change over time, but this must not be an ad-hoc process. We need to adopt these changes only after debate within the greater education environment, along with the reference groups that we work with, and other schools or institutions where learning is their focus.
202 Lucas, B., Claxton, G. & Spencer, E. (2013). Expansive Education. Berkshire, UK: Open University press, McGraw-Hill