Guidance on authentic assessment and where to start in practice.
What’s in this guide?
This guide is designed as an introduction to authentic assessment. There are some ideas for you to consider, followed by links to further reading, guidance and support. Please get in touch if you want to chat about incorporating more authentic assessment into your curriculum.
Contents:
What is authentic assessment?
An authentic assessment is, in essence, one that requires students to ‘do’ the subject. It is no more or less valid or rigorous than other forms of assessment, nor does the title imply that other assessment approaches lack ‘authenticity’.
Rather, such assessments require students to apply their knowledge and judgement in response to ‘authentic’, real-world, situations or problems and is one of many models which are rooted in ‘real-world’, experiential, teaching and learning such as: ‘integrated’; ‘work-related’; ‘contextual’; ‘alternative’, ‘team -based’ or ‘situated’ learning, ‘education for sustainable development’, and many more.
The many authentic assessment approaches, models and definitions provided in the literature can typically be characterised (see Villarroel et al 2018) by their incorporation of the following characteristics:
Realism – that is the presence of a ‘real context’ that describes and delivers a frame for the task or problem to be solved.
Note that:
- just as with most real-world problems, there may be no one right answer
- outcomes should, ideally, be those likely to be encountered in a ‘real-world’ context, such as a presentation, report, website or product.
Cognitive challenge – they require learners to draw on their higher level cognitive skills through problem solving and the creative application of knowledge to novel contexts. Such approaches challenge students to integrate new ideas with prior knowledge, apply theory to practice, engage in thoughtful analysis, evaluation and decision-making, and solve novel problems.
Evaluative judgement – they require students to:
- determine what information and skills are relevant and how they should be used
- engage with creating and using feedback to help them improve their understanding of quality and to self-regulate their own work.
Why make assessment ‘authentic’?
Three key drivers for integrating authentic assessment into our curricular are that:
- it is an approach to assessment that both develops, and tests, student learning
- students want it
- student world readiness, employability and inclusion.
Click through each of the sections below to learn more.
- It is assessment FOR learning
Authenticity has been identified as a key characteristic of assessment design which promotes learning (Villarroel et al 2017). In part, this is because authentic assessments focus as much, if not more, on engaging students in a learning process, than they do the final product. As such, they are an example of assessment FOR learning, whereby assessment and teaching are intertwined, rather than simply assessment OF learning.
The focus on developing students’ evaluative judgement in authentic assessment is a key part of such assessment for learning. For example, engaging students with evaluating their own and others’ skills, and with creating and using feedback, can contribute to students’ feedback literacy (Carless & Boud 2018). Additionally, Authentic Assessment can help students engage productively in the kinds of feedback practices they may encounter during their studies and after they graduate (Dawson et al, 2021).
- Students want it
There is good evidence that integrating well designed and thought provoking authentic assessments within curriculum design will result in greater student satisfaction in the short term and better graduate employability in the long term (James and Casidy 2018).
The focus on developing students' evaluative judgement foregrounds providing and engaging students with feedback, which is also something our students tell us they want more of.
- Student world readiness, employabilty and inclusion
“All students, regardless of location, situation, programme or mode of study, should have equitable access to opportunities to enhance their employability, make successful transitions and manage their career” (Advance HE, 2019).
Including authentic assessment in your curriculum, as part of a wider strategy of embedding employability and Universal Design for Learning, will help to equip your students with a range of specialist and transferable skills and provides an inclusive approach to enabling them to identify and achieve their aspirations.
World Readiness
“Assessment can be a powerful force in shaping individual students’ identity and sense of self-worth….it’s about who they are and who they go on to be in our society” (McArthur, 2021)
The social, economic and environmental problems facing society will require creative and flexible minds able to engage with such complex (‘wicked’) problems and offer inclusive solutions (MacArthur 2021). Authentic assessments can mirror the world as it is, but can also push the possibilities of what the world could be by helping students to make connections between knowledge learned and how that knowledge might be later applied. This might be within existing structures, systems and workplaces, or those that will replace them. Those your students will be responsible for shaping.
Employability
Authentic assessment can help to enhance student employability. It has been found to have a positive impact on basic skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication skills and teamwork (Singh, Thambusamy, and Ramly 2014) and on student learning, autonomy, motivation, self-regulation and metacognition (Villarroel et al 2017), all abilities highly related to employability in any sector (including academia).
As noted above, because the outcomes of authentic assessments should, ideally, be those likely to be encountered in a ‘real-world’ context, they can be designed to provide opportunities for students to curate experiences and outputs they can draw on in job applications and career development (Advance HE, 2021; Blaj-Ward and Matič, 2020).
Inclusion
Although our students have access to a wide range of extra-curricular opportunities to enhance their employability, the only opportunities we can be confident are available to and accessible by ALL are those embedded within the curriculum. Thus, inclusion is another key driver for including more experiential learning and authentic assessments in the curriculum.
For example, by offering students flexibility through a choice of ‘real-world’ topics or outputs we can enable them to meet learning outcomes in a personally meaningful way, i.e. tailored to their lived experience or future aspirations.
How to create authentic assessments
There are many ways you can go about making your assessments more 'authentic'.
Get inspired!
Open the list below to explore a range of assessment outcomes that might, individually or in combination, form part of an authentic assessment. You will also find links to case studies or journal articles in which such approaches are exemplified. As you will see, many of the examples given below can be adapted to a number of assessment modes (such as individual or group tasks, as parts of portfolios or as stand alone assessments).
If you would like to incorporate a new assessment, but aren't sure where to start, or would just like to talk your ideas through, please contact your Academic Developer, who will be happy to advise.
- Explore examples of authentic assessment
Some examples of authentic assessment include:
- Tests: Exam questions and MCQs can be adapted to be more ‘authentic’ by presenting a real world context or framing of the problem to be solved. See this 2020 paper by Villarroel which explores how the advantages of authenticity in assessment can be applied within the ‘testing’ approach to assessment. See also the guidance on this site on writing MCQ Assessments.
- Project work: Individual or group project responding to a real world brief, possibly set by employers. See, for example, the Physics Team Project approach at Durham University, the University of Liverpool real world client led projects for Maths students, or the Sussex Informatics Global Design Challenge which uses briefs set by the NGO Engineers without Borders.
- Presentations: Both in-person and online recorded presentations are used during graduate recruitment and in the workplace. Such assessment tasks might form part of a mini conference attended by employers from a range of sectors, or be more formative in nature, whereby students assess and feed back on one another. E.g. see the example given by Pitt (University of Kent) in his November 2020 DARE seminar (example is between minutes 27 - 30 of the recording)
- Essays: Make such tasks more authentic by explicitly situating them in the social world and in relation to issues of social justice. See the example English Literature example provided in McArthur (2022) Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society, and in Forsyth and Evans (2018) Authentic assessment for a more inclusive history. You might also draw on authentic assessment principles to develop creative and academic writing skills. See this 2021, blog post by Garnham on an authentic, creative and active essay writing assessment.
- Funding applications: For a research grant, students can explain what study could be done to explore their chosen gap in the literature, or a project funding applications for an NGO. Better still, (as suggested by Burns 2018) students could review an actual grant proposal, or each other’s proposals, and decide if they should be funded and why. See also the Conservation in Practice case study in the Embedding Employability Toolkit Canvas site.
- Policy briefings or reports: A formal, structured, and professional presentation, on paper and/or verbally, of a proposal. Students use expertise from their discipline to make recommendations to a specialised target audience, who will already have an understanding of the problem. Asking students to respond to live/real-world consultations will make such tasks even more authentic. For example see Smith’s (2020) Students as professionals: The audit experience.
- Consultancy evidence gathering and reporting: Develop practical field, laboratory and computing and reporting skills by asking students to complete consultancy reports that mimic real-life practices carried out by professionals. See, for example, the three approaches to consultancy-led assessment in Geography and Environmental Science at The University of Liverpool.
- Reflection: Include in your assessments a requirement for students to reflect upon what they have learnt from applying theory to a real world situation/experience and how this learning has informed the way they will act in the future, e.g. see Wiewiora & Kowalkiewicz (2019) The role of authentic assessment in developing authentic leadership identity and competencies
- Blog post, website, wiki or newspaper article: Creates a potentially public/sharable resource students can link to in job applications. For example, see the 2010 chapter by Shanks (pp 39-46) 'Using blog posts for peer to peer learning and summative assessment. See also Authentic assessments: using Wikipedia in the University classroom.
- Posters: E.g. a poster conference, where each group summarises a key paper in your field in the form of a poster and applies a rubric to assess each other’s contributions.
- Self assessment, peer assessment & peer review: Embed opportunities for students to apply marking criteria to their own or others’ work, including giving and receiving feedback, at the draft or proposal stage and/or in response to the final output (e.g. feedback on a presentation). This will help to develop your students’ evaluative judgement (Boud & Ajjawi 2019; Tai et al, 2017) and feedback literacy (Carless & Boud 2018 ).
You will also find a wealth of ideas in the Kay Sambell and Sally Brown Covid-19 Assessment Collection. Note, in particular, the 'Authentic assessment compendiums' (at least three) which showcase ways to design authentic assessment tasks, including LOTS of examples, alongside their more traditional counterparts.
Review your existing assessment:
Assess the ‘authenticity’ of your course or module assessments using the questions below.
Realism
Ask yourself the following questions:
- do my assessment tasks have real-world relevance?
- are my assessment tasks seamlessly integrated with situations that reflect real world scenarios?
- are my assessment outcomes recognised as authentic by both students and employers?
Cognitive Challenge
Explore the following questions:
- do assessments challenge students to engage in problem solving?
- do my assessment tasks provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different perspectives, using a variety of resources?
- do my assessments challenge students to creatively apply their knowledge to novel contexts?
Evaluative Judgment:
On evaluative judgement, it is important to ask:
- do my assessment tasks provide the opportunity to collaborate?
- do my assessment tasks allow competing solutions and diversity of outcomes?
- do my assessment tasks provide the opportunity to engage in critical reflection and self-evaluation?
(After: Sridharan & Mustard (2015), Ashford-Rowe et al (2013) & Villarroel et al (2018).
Please note that this checklist is simply a tool for reflecting on your assessment practices. Your assessment doesn’t need to meet all of these criteria for it to be considered ‘authentic’ or valuable.
Hopefully, this checklist, and the examples of authentic assessments provided above, will help identify existing assessments which fit the authentic assessment model. Or, there may be some that, with a little bit of tweaking or re-framing of the tasks, could easily be made more ‘authentic’.
Build in authentic assessments:
As noted above, authentic assessment models emphasise assessment FOR learning. So, if you’re keen to develop and embed new authentic assessments, it’s necessary, therefore, to plan how you will integrate them into your module delivery. There’s no denying this can be time consuming. However, it is also an opportunity to get creative and try something new and, maybe, kill a few birds (institutional targets) with one stone.
The model below provides a stage-based process for building authentic assessments in higher education. Adapted from Villarroell et al (2018) the model is rooted in the principle of constructive alignment, whereby the assessment is designed to support the student in constructing relevant learning through alignment between the learning outcomes, the teaching methods and the assessment.
- Step One: Real World Context
Reflect on the following questions in order to map out how your module(s) and assessment can contribute to developing your students’ academic and transferable skills. Ask yourself:
- how does my subject connect and contribute to achieving the competences of the graduation profile that this programme is committed to develop in students?
- how is the knowledge and skills learned in my subject related to the typical problems faced by society and/or by professionals in the world of work?
The
Careers, Employability and Entrepreneurship team are on hand to help you answer these questions.
See also the
Embedding Employability and Entrepreneurship Toolkit where you will find links to a wide range of case studies which include adaptable examples of problem and scenario based learning, real world case studies, and many more.
- Step Two: Design Authentic Assessment
This is your opportunity to get creative. Working with employers to devise tasks is a great way to identify a context or problem and identify a task and outcome that has real-world relevance (see the examples provided above also). However, while realism in authentic assessments is important, using simulations of real-world situations is absolutely fine. Whatever context you choose, it should urge your students to make decisions about what they need to do. In this way, Villareoll et al (2018) suggest, it is not a matter of the student reproducing course content but of discriminating what areas of their learning are needed to answer the question, be it in a multiple choice test or an extended group project.
For inspiration see:
- Sally Brown and Kay Samball’s six steps towards designing more authentic assessments in their March 2021 compendium of examples of authentic assessment in practice from diverse disciplines
- The Active Learning Network. An Active Learning approach is one where, rather than your role being one of transmitting knowledge, you engage your students in activities, such as reading, writing, discussion, or problem solving, to promote analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content. Cooperative learning, problem-based learning, and the use of case methods and simulations are some approaches that promote active learning
- Contextualise your questions within ‘wicked’ problems which have no simple answer or one-size-fits-all solutions, but require insight and collaboration from all areas of society, and impact on all workplaces. For more see the Advance HE Practice Guides for Education for Sustainable Development.
- See also the links to examples, papers and case studies provided in the Examples of Authentic Assessment section of this resource.
- Steps Three and Four: Judgement & Feedback
Steps three and four of developing your authentic assessment is to consider how to embed guidance and feedback loops which will enable students to both improve their learning and develop evaluative judgement.
It is important here to identify how and when you will provide opportunities for your students to engage with and reflect on the course or module ILOs, the assessment tasks and your marking criteria. This could be via discussion or via feedback on one or more contributory or non-contributory formative assessments.
Embedding opportunities to give and receive feedback will also help your students to understand the purposes of the assessment task and to reflect on, and improve, their own work. At the same time you will contribute to developing your students’ feedback literacy (their ability to interpret and apply feedback) and confidence in seeking and constructively applying feedback - all vital skills for lifelong learning.
Important considerations
Things to think about before changing your assessments. Click the headings below to learn more.
- Communication
Students should be provided with guidance and support in tackling any kind of assessment. The same goes for authentic assessment tasks. Indeed, the more ‘authentic’ your assessment task, the more it will engage students in new ways of applying and reflecting on their knowledge and skills, and the more guidance and support you will need to provide.
We recommend therefore that you:
- discuss with your students how your ILOs constructively align with the assessment tasks. Identify why and how the assessment will develop their practical and academic skills; emphasise where they might be applied, e.g. in other modules or in the workplace, and how your students might use their work to evidence skills to employers
- make use of your module Canvas site. Provide clear guidance and, where possible, exemplars to (a) show your students what is being assessed (b) Manage your marking workload (c) ensure consistency among markers. Students should have no ambiguity in where to focus their efforts as a result of reading the rubric. Also, consider how you might use your rubrics as a teaching tool, to help engage your students develop their evaluative judgement.
- Quality Assurance
In addition to ensuring constructive alignment between your ILOS and module assessments, ensure you also consider:
- module changes: You may need to submit change requests, for example if you want to change a presentation (PRE) to a portfolio (POF)
- equivalencies: When adding new forms of assessment outcomes, e.g. a video, written or audio submission, providing students with a suggested word count is standard practice. This should be supplemented with equivalent length/volume of other mediums. See page 5 of Don’t Panic: The Hitch-hiker's Guide to Alternative Assessment [PDF 862KB] by Damian Gordon for one such suggested table.
References and further reading
Ashford-Rowe, Herrington J. & Brown, . (2014) Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39:2, 205-222.
Burns, V. (2018) MicroCPD: Authentic Assessment. University of Birmingham Higher Education Futures Institute. Posted online on 15 Jan 2018.
Carless, D. & Boud , D. (2018) The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43:8.
Dawson, P., Carless, D. & Pui Wah Lee, P. (2021) Authentic feedback: supporting learners to engage in disciplinary feedback practices, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46:2, 286-296.
Lincoln Then, J. & Casidy, R. (2018) Authentic Assessment in Business Education: its Effects on Student Satisfaction and Promoting Behaviour. Studies in Higher Education 43 (3): 401–15.
McArthur, J. (2022) Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society. Higher Education (online)
Jorre de St Jorre, T. & Oliver, B. (2018) Want students to engage? Contextualise graduate learning outcomes and assess for employability, Higher Education Research & Development, 37:1, 44-57.
Mitchell, J. E., Nyamapfene, A., Roach, K. & Tilley, E. (2021) Faculty wide curriculum reform: the integrated engineering programme, European Journal of Engineering Education, 46:1, 48-66.
Sridharan, B. & Mustard, J. (2015) Authentic Assessment Methods: A Practical Handbook for Teaching Staff Part-I. Deakin University Faculty of Business and Law.
Tai, J., Ajjawi, R., Boud, D. et al. (2018) Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work. Higher Education 76, 467–481
Villarroel, V., Bloxham, S., Bruna, D., Bruna C. & Herrera-Seda, C. (2018) Authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43:5, 840-854.
Wiewiora, A. & Kowalkiewicz, A. (2019) The role of authentic assessment in developing authentic leadership identity and competencies, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44:3, 415-430.
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