Module 2 - Section 3
Authentic Learning & Assessment
it’s not always possible to deliver learning in the work context. There are some things which may cause ethical, practical or health and safety problems if we insisted on real work tasks as the means of providing context for learning...
“Authentic Learning exercises expose the messiness of real-life decision making, where there may not be a right or a wrong answer per se ... Such a nuanced understanding involves considerable reflective judgement, a valuable lifelong skill that goes well beyond the memorization of content”
Of course, it’s not always possible to deliver learning in the work context. There are some things which may cause ethical, practical or health and safety problems if we insisted on real work tasks as the means of providing context for learning. For example, you wouldn’t want a pilot to learn how to avoid a potential fatal crash ‘on the job’, by creating engine failures on a real flight with real passengers! Or, have a neurosurgeon learn their job on your brain. It’s much safer for all concerned if these practitioners learn the fundamentals of their jobs using simulators of some description. This is where authentic learning and assessment come in.
In common with ‘situated learning’ which we covered in the preceding section, authentic learning and assessment place great importance of learning via real-world activities and on assessment which focus on practice application. So, what is it we mean when we refer to "authentic” learning and assessment?
Our working definition of authentic learning is,
Learning delivered via activities which reflect or simulate real work situations and which require learners to use the same knowledge, skills, and values that they need to apply in real-life practice situations
and the following best defines authentic assessment for our purposes,
"an assessment requiring students to use the same competencies, or combinations of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, that they need to apply in the criterion situation [ i.e. a situation which reflects or simulates a real-life situation which could confront students in their future practice] in professional life"
Here’s Jan Herrington (Professor of Education at Murdoch University, Australia and one of the authors of “A guide to Authentic e-Learning” talking about her definition of authentic learning:
Currently, in academic learning, assessment is based on the premise of measuring the inherent knowledge of the learner; valuing ability as demonstrated in national school examinations and/or college and university examinations. However, the authentic assessment approach starts from the viewpoint that knowledge and ability cannot be measured in isolation from the environment in which the learning takes place, or is the subject of the learning. Therefore, it has been suggested that:
"[valid] assessment is impossible unless ability is expressed at a place of practice ... it is nonsensical to separate test from practice"
Thus, in order to assess more accurately the learners’ ability to apply learning to the real world, it is argued that assessment which either takes place in practice or via means which aim to simulate practice, will be most effective. To assist in implementing this approach, Wiggins (1990) proposed the following criteria for developing authentic assessments:
- The tasks within should reflect the skills that would be used in practice.
- The assessment should be based on unstructured problems that require judgment and innovation to solve.
- The students must be required to go through procedures typical of the discipline.
- The context of the assessment should be as similar as possible to the real context of the problem in practice.
- The students should be required to demonstrate a wide range of skills in solving the problem(s) presented in the assessment.
- The assessment should allow for feedback, practice, and additional chances to solve the problems.
In addition to these criteria, Judith Gulikers (Gulikers et al 2004) suggests that the assessment criteria should be based on criteria used to determine success in the real world and that these should be explicit and transparent to learners before the assessment begins.
However, the issue here is not solely an assessment issue. If we are to adopt the principles summarised above, the implication is that the learning which leads to assessment also has to be authentic: i.e. learning must relate closely to cases/scenarios/situations likely to be encountered by individuals in the workplace. This will, in some instances, require a fundamental shift in the approach taken to teaching and learning. The implication is that there would be less emphasis on knowledge acquisition and more emphasis on more active problem based learning.
Here’s what Jan Herrington has to say on the topic of authentic learning tasks:
In thinking about digital learning, Herrington points out that there is increasing agreement, that computer-based simulations provide a powerful and acceptable vehicle for the critical characteristics of such practice situated learning to be delivered away from the workplace (Herrington, 2006, p.2). Indeed, Herrington and Oliver write that,
“In-depth qualitative studies revealed that the most successful learning environments employing authentic tasks ... provide ‘cognitive realism’ and ... assist with the necessary ‘suspension of disbelief’ that is sometimes required in such learning environments”
and
“the use of authentic tasks encourages and supports immersion in self-directed and independent learning”
Therefore, there would appear to be evidence to support the positive role of incorporating authentic learning approaches to the education of students and development of staff, and of the potential of simulations based on these principles to be effective vehicles for learning in circumstances where practice learning opportunities may not exist, or may be difficult to engineer for a variety of reasons.
The Scottish Social Services Council has used the principles of authentic learning as the basis for its simulations which you can have a look at here:
- Multi-Professional Practice Simulation for social services, healthcare and education
- Childhood Practice (2 simulations)
- Self-Directed Support
- Making Better Decisions (scenario-based learning re. ethical practice)
These examples will hopefully help you see how the principles can be applied in practice.
Activity 3
Blog
We’d like you to create a 10-minute presentation (Slides and Notes) explaining the and how you could apply key features of Authentic Learning to a specific example of classroom based learning and development offered by your organization to its staff. The resulting presentation should be shared on your blog.
There are benefits associated with adopting more authentic approaches to learning and assessment. Potentially, students would be better prepared for the realities of practice where the learning content and assessment closely mirror the realities of the practice environment they will be moving into on completion of their studies (or are currently working in), and for the institution and/or employers,
"More authenticity is likely to increase the predictive validity of the assessment because of the resemblance between the assessment and real professional practice"
Therefore, arguably it would be a much easier to see the link between successful academic performance and success in the practice world. For the educator, the use of authentic learning and assessment methodologies should help improve students' ability to identify links between theory and practice.
There are many examples of the implementation of authentic learning and assessment methodologies. In their paper published in "Nurse Education Today", Norman Woolley and Yvonne Jarvis describe the operation of a simulated clinical environment, the Clinical Practice Suite at the University of Glamorgan, to develop and assess clinical skills for Nurse education. This suite is used to allow student to rehearse clinical skills
free from the range of stimuli that would normally compete for the attention of learners in the practice setting. It allows for many clinical procedures to be simulated on mannequins and for high levels of proficiency to be acquired before students are required to practise on real patients".
This environment, which replicates hospital ward conditions, was designed to ensure that students had the opportunity to practice clinical skills in a controlled environment, under the supervision of subject experts and was seen as also providing valuable preparation for practice placement in real clinical settings.
In teacher education in the USA, Maya Israel and her colleagues developed online case-based learning and assessment materials to allow students to work collaboratively on curriculum content which attempted to prepare teachers for the complexities they would be likely to encounter in practice. To achieve this, they used specifically designed Wikis which contained information and associated materials (e.g. audio, video, simulated documents based on real-world examples etc.) relating to pre-defined cases.
Making full use of the collaborative working options available within the Wiki environment, as well as options for synchronous and asynchronous communications technologies embedded in the environment, they work collaboratively to solve the issues within the cases. In doing so, via feedback from the tutor and supplementary material provided, they learn that their decisions result in both positive and negative consequences. They are then required to re- evaluate their original decisions to account for those consequences.
"This cyclical nature of evaluative case studies begins to introduce the collaborative problem solving structures that exist in well-defined and successful [school] settings. Consequently, the evaluative case studies in this wiki allow teacher educators to create sophisticated and realistic authentic assessments that measure not only their mastery of content ... but also their ability to apply those skills to the complexities of [real, educational settings]"
These two examples make use of very different environments to implement authentic approaches to learning and assessment: physical simulation of actual practice environments in one case, and a virtual platform in the other. However, each sought to enable students to make connections between the learning content in question and its application to the practice expected of them in the real world.
As indicated previously, there are challenges to be addressed in adopting this approach to learning and assessment. Critics would highlight the fact that whilst action being taken by the learner is visible and therefore relatively straightforward to assess., it is not as straightforward to assess the "invisible" thought processes of the learner: their reflection on activity. However, the research undertaken by Stables, McLaren & Bain (2007) and Israel, Anderson & (2008) highlight means of addressing this difficulty
"authentic assessments must ... facilitate collaborative work, provide ongoing opportunities for feedback, and highlight individual work within the collaborative structure"
Stables and her colleagues used a series of simple questions at various key points in the process of the learner undertaken a defined task designed to encourage them to write down and reflect on the reasoning behind decisions they had made as part of the task process
"To address this assessment problem, we developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to introducing ... evidence prompts, designed to introduce a 'pause for thought'"
Therefore, with sufficient foresight and planning the assessment issues can be resolved. The more challenging barrier to wider adoption of authentic learning and assessment may lie in the logistics of the process. Maya Israel and her colleagues state that a major barrier to the using the case-based authentic approach to learning and assessment is that,
"these forms of assessments may require more time to complete as they not only require students to synthesize a wide range of knowledge to solve complex problems, but they also must provide opportunities for ongoing reflection and problem-solving. The paper and pencil tests that are traditionally used in higher education, on the other hand, involve a one-time test for which instructors provide a grade and limited feedback."
Although these challenges are not insignificant, it seems, from the research evidence currently available, there is much to gain not only for the individual learner, but for the professional groups involved, by adopting more authentic approaches to learning and assessment.
Activity 4
Blog
We’d like you to write a brief description of how you might apply the principles of authentic learning and/or assessment to your work situation. You might want to consider the potential benefits and pitfalls as well. Drafting answers to the following may help you structure the material for your account:
- What learning/educational setting do you work in? (please describe briefly)
- What is the profile of your learner group (age/stage; ability etc)?
- Which aspects of authentic learning and assessment do you think would be most applicable to your setting?
- Which aspects of authentic learning and assessment do you think would be most applicable to your setting?
- What types of learning/assessment activity could you apply these to?
- Can you identify potential benefits of authentic approaches to learning and assessment?
- Can you anticipate any potential barriers to implementing authentic learning and assessment?
You should write up your account either in a blog post or as an MSWord/PDF file and post the link or file to your blog.
As you’d expect, not everyone is in favour of this approach. There is some "debate" between some prominent academics regarding the validity of authentic learning and assessment and other aligned constructivist approaches to learning and development. Over the course of the last two years, a number of leading academics have taken up positions on either side of the Cognitive Theory/Directed Instruction (Kirschner, Sweller & Clark) v Authentic/ Constructivist Theory (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, Chinn, Kuhn, Schmidt , Loyens, van Gog, Paas) divide and proceeded to engage in some (for them) heated debate on the merits or otherwise of their chosen position in relation to effective learning.
Whilst this debate is interesting (to a certain extent), in some respects it is rather disheartening to stand on the sidelines and witness these exchanges, all the time wondering why the two camps can't see the value in blending the two approaches. As Hmelo-Silver et al point out
"we need to develop deeper and more detailed understandings of the interrelationships between the various instructional approaches and their impact on learning outcomes in different contexts"
The dogmatic adherence to, and application of, one theoretical approach to practice in learning and development is not normally a recommended course of action. In deciding the best way forward, we as professionals, have to be flexible in our approach and blend elements of various theoretical perspectives in order to best meet the needs of those whom we are attempting to assist. Surely this is as applicable in an educational context as it is in the world of work?
We also have some further reading for you to consider.