Module 4 - Authentic Assessment

“A good education makes knowledge, skill, and ideas useful. Assessment should determine whether you can use your learning, not merely whether you learned stuff.”

This is a quote from an article written by Grant Wiggins, titled Healthier Testing Made Easy: The Idea of Authentic Assessment. It seems to sum up everything there is to understand about authentic assessment. The reading this week discuss the benefits of these assessments and the negatives of the common testing that many schools still require. Instead of using a few multiple-choice tests each year to analyze what the students have “learned” over the course of the school year, many teachers are using authentic assessments throughout the year. This tends to be a better way to evaluate what the students know and it allows them to show it. They can do this by completing individual or group projects, writing in blogs or wikis, and even by performing or debating.

For an example of how this is working in some schools, one needs to evaluate the work being done in 30+ schools involved in the New York Performance Standards Consortium. According to the article, Assessment for Understanding by Roberta Furger, These schools have adopted “rigorous performance assessments” over the typical testing requirements of other New York schools. All of the assessments are based on standards and use rubrics to “grade” the students. Students in these schools have a much higher college acceptance rate than the regular students in those schools that just use regular testing

(91% compared to 62%, respectively).

In my own experience, I have always enjoyed learning about something that I find beneficial. It has always been easier to take the time to learn about a subject that applies to my career and consists of information that I see useful in my day-to-day experiences. I have a belief that most students probably feel the same way. I feel learning in a way that relate to students’ everyday lives can be so very engaging. Once a student can see why they are learning a subject, it makes it easier to learn it.