Authentic Assessment

In education, authentic assessment is the measurement of intellectual accomplishments that are worthwhile, significant and meaningful, devised either by the teacher alone or in collaboration with students. Applying authentic assessment to student learning means judging a student's work against criteria tied to the construction of knowledge, disciplined inquiry, and value beyond the school itself, and it tends to focus on contextualized tasks that let students demonstrate competency in a more realistic setting mirroring the problem solving required outside school. Assessment design under this framework begins with the same question curriculum design begins with, what students should be able to do, and once that is answered an instructor devises a rubric to judge how well a student demonstrates the ability to complete the task; because authentic assessments usually require a judgment of quality, they tend toward the subjective end of the assessment scale, and rubrics attempt to make those subjective judgments as objective, clear, consistent and defensible as possible by explicitly defining the criteria performance is judged against.