View Content #24452

By Isabelle Sackville-West, CASLS Fellow

In education, there is a pervasive concern about whether schools can maintain consistent standards. This concern is reflected in the use of mass assessment. The issue with mass assessment, however, is that its results provide little evidence of students’ real cognitive capabilities (Wiggins, 2011, p.82). Wiggins (ibid.) posits that tests should not be the standardized mass testing that many students are accustomed to, but rather a more “authentic and equitable” form of assessment (p.81). A true test of a student’s ability is to perform consistently and complete tasks with criteria that are both understood and valued (ibid., p.84). These assessments should be designed to replicate the complex challenges that one faces beyond the classroom. For example, professionals need to be competent writers, be able to conduct individual research, and collaborate to develop proposals. Authentic testing should be responsive to the student and his or her environment and be evaluated in such a way as to include negotiation and dialogue between the tester and proctor (ibid., p.81). As Wiggins (ibid.) states, authentic assessment should, “[reveal] achievement on the essentials, even if they are not easily quantified. In other words, an authentic test not only reveals student achievement to the examiner, but also reveals to the test-taker the actual challenges and standards of a field” (ibid., p.82).

One modern assessment that embodies the tenets of authentic assessment is the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA). The IPA is designed to measure students’ progress towards national standards of foreign language learning while simultaneously catalyzing pedagogical change (Adair-Hauck et al., 2006, p.359-360). Like Wiggins' authentic assessment, the IPA values student improvement over the auditing of student performance (ibid., p.360). In an IPA, students are expected to employ their own linguistic knowledge to create products and respond to open-ended prompts individually or in a collaborative setting (Adair-Hauck et al., 2006, p.361). Students begin by completing an interpretive task which might include reading an article and discussing it with the proctor, creating a feed-back loop in which the two negotiate meaning. Then, to assess interpersonal communication, students might interview fellow classmates or engage in a realistic roleplay related to the topic at hand. Finally, to assess presentational communication, students might write an application letter using the information gained from the previous tasks to demonstrate their knowledge of the topic and convince a reader that they deserve to be admitted into a given program (ibid., 368-370). All of these tasks are designed to be realistic and representative of tasks completed in real life. The IPA assessment not only upholds and applies the core values of authentic assessment, but also connects them to the standardization process.

Authentic assessment and the IPA, are both designed to mimic the ambiguity of real-world challenges and offer dynamic testing with quality feedback (ibid. 2006, p.361-362). By evaluating students in creative and equitable ways, students are able to produce their own original work, pose critical questions, and tackle problems (Wiggins, 2011, p.83-84). Though authentic assessment is not as clean-cut as traditional mass-testing, it provides a way to more effectively evaluate student’s work while increasing student autonomy, confidence, and practical experience; setting students up to succeed in the real world.

References

Adair-Hauck, B., Glisan, E. W., Koda, K., & Swender, E. (2006, Fall). The Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA): Connecting Assessment to Instruction and Learning. Foreign Language Annals, 39(3), 359-382. doi:10.1111/j.1944-9720.2006.tb02894.x  

Wiggins, G. (2011, April). A True Test: Toward more authentic and equitable assessment. Phi Delta Kappan Magazine, 92(7), 81-93. doi:10.1177/003172171109200721