Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment requires the respondent to construct, rather than select, a response to academic stimuli (e.g., tests, papers) (Salvia & Ysseldyke, 2001). A rubric, based on set criteria, is used to evaluate and assign a number or proficiency level [Page 36]to the response. Authentic assessments are typically performance or portfolio assessments designed to measure complex skills such as synthesis, analysis, and collaboration (Vanderwood & Powers, 2002). For example, an authentic assessment may require a group of students to collaborate on analyzing and synthesizing disparate information on a country in order to formulate international policy for that country to be delivered in a mock United Nations address. Table 1 provides additional examples of authentic assessments.

Authentic assessments generally measure skills rather than traits. They are a more direct measure of a skill than tests of cognitive or psychological processing, which require a greater level of inference to draw conclusions about the trait being measured (Salvia & Yesseldyke, 2001). Authentic assessment tasks are designed to support and even enhance the curriculum as well as to assess whether specific instructional objectives are met, whereas traditional psychoeducational assessments attempt to measure more global or innate skills such as intelligence. Accordingly, authentic assessments provide information that is more relevant to the curriculum and instruction of a student than that offered by traditional psychoeducational assessments. For this reason, authentic assessments are more useful in planning instructional programs than for determining eligibility for special education (although a response-to-intervention model for determining special education eligibility could employ authentic assessments to monitor a student's progress).

Authentic assessments have long been the preferred method of assessing the progress of students with low incidence disabilities (e.g., severe mental retardation, deaf-blindness, etc.) (Coutinho & Malouf, 1993). They gained popularity in general education as dissatisfaction with multiple-choice achievement tests grew (Salvia & Ysseldyke, 2001). During the 1980s large-scale minimum competency testing was widespread, and detractors of these programs argued that these multiple-choice tests failed to assess important “real-life” or authentic skills. In other words, life is not a series of multiple-choice problems; rather, students must be prepared to respond in thoughtful and meaningful ways to complex problems.

Authentic assessments are designed to assess students' procedural knowledge as well as their content or declarative knowledge (Mehrens, 1992). Authentic assessments often provide a multitude of ways for a student to arrive at an answer and contain a record of the student's thought processes (e.g., logs, outlines). By examining how students construct their responses, teachers are better able to identify and correct errors in logic or applications of a new skill. An added benefit of authentic assessments is that they are often much more engaging to students than traditional multiple-choice exams.

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