Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment enables educators to determine students' skills, knowledge, and competencies and to provide evidence of their learning. Utilizing a variety of performance-based measures, complex rubrics, and real-world tasks, authentic assessment encourages greater understanding of concepts in a meaningful context. Developed in response to the rote memorization and less complex assessments of objective measurements such as multiple-choice tests, which have been traditionally employed in education, authentic assessment provides a more engaging and effective way to measure students' learning while promoting understanding and valuing the process of learning. This entry looks at how the process developed and how it works.