Authentic Assessment in Online Courses

As with any type of assessment, begin by outlining the knowledge, skills, and attitudes learners will be asked to demonstrate.  Consult the course and program learning outcomes to identify relevant learning goals for the assessment.  Create a list of what learners should know and be able to do, including any transferable skills.  Remember that authentic assessments often measure the performance of more than one learning objective.

Sometimes the learning outcome clearly denotes the authentic task the student must perform.

In other cases, we must ask ourselves how this knowledge and these skills would be applied in the real world. What discipline-specific tasks related to the learning goal would a graduate perform in the workplace? How could these skills be used in real life?

The following table lists examples of authentic assessment tasks suitable for online assessment.

Types of authentic assessments. Adapted from: (Walvoord & Anderson, 1998)

"Rethinking Assessment Strategies for Online Learning: Examples of Authentic Assessments", is licensed by the Seneca Teaching and Learning Centre under CC BY NC SA

As mentioned, authentic assessments require constructed, personalized, and creative solutions to real world challenges. This attribute often confuses instructors and teaching assistants when it comes to evaluating the assignment. Since there are no right or wrong answers, it is essential that the assessment design specify the characteristics of good performance.

Determining these evaluation criteria is perhaps the most challenging part of crafting an authentic online assessment. When defining the performance measures, focus only on the essential criteria necessary to meet the learning goals and match the number of criteria with the complexity of the task. Align the criteria to industry and professional standards of practice where appropriate.

Involve learners in the criteria definition process by asking what good performance on the task means to them. Co-creating assessment criteria improves learners’ understanding of assessment expectations and what they must do to meet these standards of performance.

A rubric not only shows students what they need to do to be successful in an assessment, but rubrics also present a means of evaluation that reduces subjective grading by providing specific and detailed criteria. By presenting a detailed and consistent breakdown of what is expected at various levels of performance, educators are able to examine each assessment through the same lens and mark consistently.

Successful implementation of a rubric relies on it being:

• specific and detailed, but offers some flexibility for creative assessments
• issued to students at the same time as the assessment/assignment instructions
• reviewed and revised (as needed) with the students before it is used, and then following use – you will often find gaps the first few times you use a rubric.

There are 2 types of rubrics, and the type selected will be dependent on the assessment you are developing it for:

Holistic

Provides an overall snapshot of progress or achievement.  They share feedback on where a student is currently situated relative to an outcome without getting into granular detail, and provide them with a benchmark to work toward in improving their performance.  These rubrics are ideal for formative feedback on initial submissions, draft assignments, and assessments where the overall performance is being evaluated.

Analytic

Provides specific numerical (grade) allocation on predetermined ‘parts’ of an assessment.  These are generally grids that specify levels of achievement, aligned with categories and descriptions of requirements.

In some instances, rubrics may not be the ideal evaluation tool. Some assessments require a “did” or “did not”, complete or incomplete approach. In these cases, a checklist or rating scale can not only be useful in supporting objective evaluation, but can also provide students with the specific assessment elements or tasks you are looking for – very much like a rubric. A checklist or rating scale is the simplest way to determine the presence or absence of any component of a given assessment.

Checklists

Verbiage for checklists may include:

• Complete and incomplete
• Yes and no
• Present and absent
• Acceptable and unacceptable

Checklists are best used in formative assessments to provide students with an overview of how they are progressing towards a goal, but can also be valuable in summative assessments, particularly when a set of skills is being demonstrated or inclusions (in a report, for example) are being considered. As with rubrics, checklists should be provided to, and discussed with, the students at the same time as the assessment instructions, and should be reviewed and revised each time it is used.

Rating Scales

Rating scales combine the simplicity of a checklist with the more specific level of achievement of a rubric.  A rating scale indicates how well a student performed on a specific element of an assessment or task, based on expected outcomes, but lacks the granularity of performance descriptors.  As such, rating scales are an excellent tool for self-assessment, diagnostic or formative assessments, and even peer feedback.

• Rethinking Assessment Strategies for Online Learning Copyright © 2022 by Seneca College; Durham College; Algonquin College; and University of Ottawa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
• Sardo, C. & Sindelar, A. (2019). Scaffolding Online Student Success. Faculty Focus. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/scaffolding-online-student-success/?st=FFdaily;s=FF190327;utm_term=FF190327