Assessment plays a vital role in online learning. It helps students track their progress, pinpoint strengths and areas for improvement, and ultimately ensures they meet the course’s learning objectives. Although each of these characteristics serves a valuable instructional or pedagogical function, it’s also important that assessments engage students and prepare them with the skills they’ll need in their future.
Assessment isn’t just important from a student perspective. With the online marketplace becoming increasingly crowded, it’s critical that institutions ensure they are offering the courses and experiences that students are looking for. Given the rise of online education, institutions must stand out by offering relevant learning experiences that meet students’ needs. According to Magda and Aslanian (2018), 74% of online learners pursue education to advance their careers—whether transitioning to a new field, updating skills, or meeting job requirements.
In this post, we’ll discuss the benefits and challenges of this type of assessment and how you can incorporate authentic assessment in your online course.
What Is Authentic Assessment?
An authentic assessment asks students to apply what they’ve learned to realistic or real-world situations. As education expert Grant Wiggins (1998) outlines, authentic assessments:- Simulate real-life challenges and require students to “do” the subject.
- Encourage judgment, innovation, and complex thinking.
- Provide opportunities for practice, feedback, and revision.
- Reflect workplace or personal life scenarios students may encounter after graduation.
Benefits of Authentic Assessments
Authentic assessment break the traditional paradigm of multiple-choice or automatically scoring tests and quizzes, which can lead students to believe that learning means staying up all night and cramming to memorize terms or expected answers. Instead, authentic assessments tend to be more student centered, as they ask students to demonstrate their learning through hands-on activities. Rather than asking students to memorize and recall facts, authentic assessments ask students to actively participate in situations that require them to apply the principles they’ve learned about in the instructional material. Thus, learning isn’t about recalling; it’s about performing, which, ideally, will motivate students to engage in the course and succeed in their endeavors.Benefits
- Applicable Skills: Authentic assessments shift the focus from rote memorization to problem-solving and application, mirroring real skills.
- Student-Centered Learning: They encourage creativity and deeper engagement through active participation in practical activities.
- Motivation: Students are more likely to engage when assessments relate to their personal or career goals.
Drawbacks of Authentic Assessment
As beneficial as authentic assessments can be, they do present challenges as well. For students, authentic assessments typically take longer to complete than an average quiz or test. Because these types of assessments are task based, they might be scaffolded over a number of modules or some other period of time. In addition, students might be more accustomed to traditional assessment, meaning that despite the advantages we’ve discussed, they might need some time to adjust to this new method.- Time-Intensive: Designing and grading authentic assessments takes more time and effort than traditional tests.
- Student Adjustment: Some students may initially struggle with the shift from familiar multiple-choice tests to more open-ended tasks.
- Subjectivity in Grading: Since authentic assessments evaluate complex skills, grading can be more subjective, making clear rubrics essential.
How to Develop an Authentic Assessment
Now that we’ve explored the benefits and drawbacks of authentic assessment and looked at a handful of examples, let’s move on to the steps involved in designing an authentic assessment. The following steps, based on those developed by the University of Florida’s Center for Instructional Technology and Training (2018), can help set you on your way toward developing an authentic assessment that addresses your learning objectives, enhances your course, and meets your students’ needs.Identify Learning Objectives
Your learning objectives are the cornerstone of your course; they communicate what students should be able to do and what skills they’ll develop during the course. Thus, it goes without saying that developing an authentic assessment should begin with these objectives. By starting this process with an objective in mind, you ensure that the authentic assessment you’re developing will align with the objective and any corresponding instructional material. When you look at your objectives, it’s also important to keep relevance in mind. After all, one of the major benefits of an authentic assessment is how it allows students to engage in a relevant or new environment, so you’ll want to make sure that your learning objectives lend themselves to that type of activity. If your learning objectives are already measurable and student centered, though, this shouldn’t be a problem.Define Relevant Tasks
After identifying the learning objective(s) you’re looking to measure through your authentic assessment, you can then start defining what students will actually do. Think about what professionals in your field do and how those tasks can align with your learning objectives. Use the verb in your objective (e.g., “analyze” or “develop”) to inspire real-world tasks. Ultimately, the relevance of your assessment to students’ lives and/or goals should be clear. In fact, it’s helpful to state the relevance explicitly at the outset of the assessment. Oftentimes, you’ll find that you’re able to define your task by looking at what the objective asks students to do. For instance, if the objective for a business course is that students will be able to analyze the local and global impact of organizational decisions, consider creating a fictional scenario in which students have to make organizational decisions for a business and analyze the impact of those decisions. Looking at your objective’s verb also ensures that your assessment aligns with your learning objective, which is a pillar of effective course design.Identify Essential Performance Criteria
Determine what successful performance looks like. Clear criteria will help both you and your students measure progress and identify areas for improvement. To return to our business example from earlier, you’d want to make sure that the way you measure students’ performance is reflective of or similar to the expectations they would encounter in a business scenario. For example, you’d want to create performance criteria specific to how students should make the organizational decisions and how accurately and/or appropriately they analyze those decisions.Develop a Rubric
Rubrics are a powerful tool for many assessment types, and they’re an essential component of authentic assessment. After all, authentic assessments are fairly subjective, and rubrics help ensure instructors are grading fairly and consistently from assessment to assessment and student to student. With this in mind, once you’ve identified the task and essential performance criteria, the next step is to develop a rubric.Conclusion
Authentic assessments do more than measure what students know—they help students build the skills they’ll need beyond the classroom. While they may require more time and planning, the benefits far outweigh the challenges by fostering deeper learning, real-world application, and student engagement. Key Takeaways:- Authentic assessments connect course content to real-world tasks.
- They encourage active learning and develop critical thinking skills.
- Clear rubrics and performance criteria are essential for consistent grading.
- While time-intensive, these assessments motivate students and enhance learning outcomes.
