Authentic Assessment

Roxanne Newton

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. In the 1990s, renewed interest in holding public education accountable led state legislatures and the U.S. government to require ongoing and in-depth testing at various points in students' educational careers. Performance-based funding initiatives in states across the nation ensured that testing would become standardized in an attempt to homogenize the curricula ...

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