Making assessment authentic: Questions and challenges for middle years research and practice.

Phil Cormack

University of South Australia

This paper considers the ways in which authenticity is constructed in

materials written for teachers about authentic assessment in the middle

years. The concept of authentic assessment provides some real

possibilities for teachers working with adolescents through allowing

greater variety and innovation in curriculum and teaching. However

there are also important questions to be raised, particularly for

teachers in diverse communities, about who the assessment is authentic

for and about what counts for authenticity. The implications of these

issues for research in middle schools are considered.

Introduction

There has been considerable interest in middle schooling in Australia

during the 1990s largely in response to a perceived failure of primary

and secondary education to successfully meet the needs of adolescent

learners leading to concerns about adolescent alienation from school

[Cormack, 1996 #48], [Cumming, 1996 #49]. Like those in most western

nations, Australian governments face social changes which impact

particularly on young people Ð from the closing down of employment

opportunities to the impact of burgeoning communications technologies

and new forms of mass media which particularly target young people.

There are calls from commentators from the right and the left to reform

schooling in the face of general crisis of confidence in schooling.

Puckett and Black's (1994), comments are typical:

[A] new century will soon dawn and with it new perspectives on

educating the world's people. Indeed, as futurists anticipate the

twenty-first century, they project knowledge, skills, and

characteristics that will be needed for people to survive successfully.

... Many professionals ... share the view that schooling as we have

experienced it, and as we know it today, must undergo dramatic change

if these characteristics are to be nurtured in learners. (Puckett &

Black 1994, p.4)

There have been many responses to this 'crisi's in education Ð a focus

on literacy as a key element of the curriculum, a shift of resources to

'early intervention' to prevent later problems, the establishment of

national and related state curriculum frameeir potential effects on

different groups in schools. We brought to authentic assessment a

healthy scepticism about assessment reform and an awareness that no

single measure, such as changing the assessment system, would prove a

panacea for the contemporary challenges facing middle years education.

The idea that any testing techniqueÑbe it a new test design or a

national test or systemÑcan reform our schools and restore our nation's

competitiveness is the height of technological arrogance... [I]t is

important that we submit generalized negative claims about public

schools and accompanying proposals to reform themÑsuch as alternative

assessmentsÑto relentless, thorough examination. We need to treat

critic's fixed beliefs and unexamined ideological response to reform as

hypotheses to be tested. Until then, our schools will continue to be

the object of facile cures and fiddling reformism. (Madaus, Raczek &

Clarke 1997, p.22)

At the same time, however, we did not want to overlook the potential of

middle schooling generally, and authentic assessment in particular, to

offer new spaces and openings for teachers to address issues of social

justice and improving learning outcomes for students disadvantaged by

current approaches to schooling. Our interest as researchers and

teachers was to bring a positive agenda to considering how schools

might respond to 'new time's. Middle schooling can be seen as an

attempt to remake education so that it better helps young people learn

about and become informed and critical participants in the change

process. Our concern is not only to take a positive agenda to this

change process, but to consider how all students gain from middle

school reform, including those groups traditionally failed by schools.

It was this dual agenda that informed our considerations of authentic

assessment Ð while seeing a need for change in response to new times,

we were wary about claims for reform processes.

We began the research process by critically reading the literature to

consider how authentic assessment was being described, what claims were

being made for it, and what guidance was provided for teachers and

schools. We raised questions of social justice and questions related to

how authentic assessment might help students and schools respond to

contemporary social challenges facing young people. Our questions

included:

¥ how does authentic assessment promote achievement by traditionally

disadvantaged students?

¥ what does authentic assessment construct as valued learning or

'succes's and how does that relate to student's lives now and in the

future?

This last question reveals our understanding of assessment, not as a

neutral tool, but as a social and cultural construct. In our view,

assessment does not 'measure' learning (a view that sees learning as an

unproblematic, natural or given process), rather it constitutes

learning, in that it specifies what will 'count' as learning and

valorises particular ways of displaying that learning. This explains

why assessment is a key arena for debates in education, because there

are important consequences arising from decisions about whose versions

of valued knowledge and processes, and displays of learning will

'count'.

The question of achievement of traditionally disadvantaged students

seemed to us a key one to ask of any educational reform. An exciting

part of the project was that academics and teachers would be working

together, in schools, to consider how authentic assessment worked in

practice and, particularly, how it impacted on disadvantaged students.

In our view, reforms that make a difference for these students must

involve teachers in examining and reimagining their pedagogy. As

Connell (1994) points out, teachers have been excluded from policy

debate around school reform, yet what teachers do in their classrooms

is crucial to making a difference.

We may not wish to blame teachers, but we also cannot ignore them.

Education as a cultural enterprise is constituted in and through their

labor. Their work is the arena where the great contradictions around

education and social justice condense. (Connell 1994, p.137)

We therefore wished to consider these issues with the teachers and not

assume that authentic assessment was necessarily a 'good' thing for all

students.

Describing authentic assessment

Descriptions of authentic assessment have tended to focus on defining

by example. This definition by Simon (1986) is typical:

Authentic assessment, also known as alternative or performance

assessment, includes such ways to measure student progress as writing

portfolios, cooperative group projects, exhibitions, observations,

personal communication, experiments, and performances... At their core

is student's ability to apply knowledge to solve real problems (Simon

1986).

A defining marker of authentic assessment is that the link between the

curriculum and assessment is explicit so that the process tests what is

taught and leads back to better informed teaching and learning.

Instruction and assessment are intimately connected; students are

expected to produce and demonstrate integrated forms of knowledge and

competence; assessment criteria are clear and known in advance by

students and staff; and the products of the student's intellectual

efforts have value beyond the purpose of assessment (Archbald 1991).

The literature that uses the term 'authentic assessment' (as opposed to

specific issues such as portfolios) does not provide a large number of

explicit examples of how it works in schools there tends to be a

focus on issues of principle and broad procedure rather than

illustrations of actual practice. Importantly for our project, there

were very few examples provided from Australian contexts with most

examples provided from the USA. Much of the authentic assessment

literature coming from this context seemed to be written in response to

a debate and a concern about the impact of large-scale standardised

assessment systems on schooling Ð in other words authentic assessment

comes to be defined as much by what it is not, as by what it is.

Authentic assessment Ð six key aspects

Our reading of the literature and our subsequent research and analysis

with the teacher researchers involved in the project, led us to

identify six key aspects of authentic assessment. That is, the term

'authentic' was seen to imply assessment that:

1 connects assessment to the curriculum

2 engages students, teachers and others in assessing performance

3 looks beyond the school for models and sites of action

4 promotes complex thinking and problem solving

5 encourages student 'performance' of their learning

6 engages with issues of equity

Full discussion of each of these aspects of authentic assessment is to

be found in [Cormack, 1997 #47]. For the purposes of this paper these

characteristics will be discussed briefly, before a fuller discussion

of the way in which authentic assessment does, or does not address

issues of equity.

Connects assessment to the curriculum

It has been taken for granted that valid student assessment should be

connected to the curriculum that students experience. However, in the

face of growing trends to 'standardise' at least some forms of student

assessment across schools and systems, there has been a move to

re-articulate the rationale for curriculum-connected assessment. As the

traditional subject divisions are seen to be broken down in middle

school curriculum, assessment tasks need to reflect the

cross-disciplinary nature of learning Ð 'the problems of the modern

world do not fall neatly into the divisions of the traditional

discipline's (Lowe 1995, p.28). Stefonek (1991, p.1) characterises

these new forms of curriculum as sites in which there is 'disciplined

enquiry that integrates and produces knowledge, rather than reproduces

fragments of information others have discovered.' Authentic assessment

is seen to provide ways for the assessment of knowledge and skills

developed in such cross-disciplinary curricula.

There are, however, a number of issues that are rarely raised in the

literature but deserve closer consideration. It is apparent that some

of the literature on authentic assessment fails to recognise the

complexity and contested nature of 'the curriculum'. It largely assumes

that the 'reform's to the curriculum embodied in general policy

statements are transparently 'good' and 'needed' if schools are to

prepare children to face a range of largely unknown challenges in the

next century. Missing from the literature are fundamental questions

about whose conceptions of the future dominate 'the curriculum', who

has a legitimate stake in 'the curriculum', and what groups stand to

gain and which may lose through the reform process.

Engages students, teachers and others in assessing performance

The adoption of learner centred pedagogies, the promotion of

collaborative ways of working and learning, and a broader acceptance of

collective decision making in schools have enabled some teachers to

involve students, peers, parents, and other members of the community in

assessing student performance. Authentic assessment tasks involve

students in sharing their learning with a wider audience than the

teacher. For instance, students may present key aspects of their

learning from a particular project at a ÒroundtableÓ made up of the

presenters and peers, parents or family members, teachers and invited

guests who may include college professors, union representatives,

superintendents, teachers from other schools or recent graduates from

the particular school. (Allison, [1995]) Presenting their learning to a

wider audience than the teacher enables students to receive feedback

and help from a wide range of sources, some of whom may be able to

offer advice that is more relevant, or has more meaning to the student,

than that which is given by the teacher (Burke 1996). A related

development has been greater explicitness in assessment criteria. The

move to involve others in assessment has required teachers to 'publish'

their assessment criteria and to negotiate them with other

stakeholders.

Looks beyond the school for models and sites of action

One of the key ways that advocates of authentic assessment encourage

teachers to meet the challenges of a changing world is by looking

beyond the school for models and inspiration in designing assessment

tasks and making judgements about student's learning. Instead of

narrowly focussed, school-bound assessment tasks, it is argued,

students need opportunities to engage in challenging, performance-based

tasks that are similar to those undertaken by workers in non school

settings, and which require analysis, integration of knowledge,

invention, highly developed written and oral expression

(Darling-Hammond et al. 1995) and opportunities to use problem solving,

decision making skills, learning strategies and creative thinking

(Kushman n.d.). Tasks described in the literature as more

representative of expectations beyond the school include 'roundtable'

presentations to an audience made up of school and non school

representatives (Allison 1995), student portfolios of work samples

(McMillan 1997) and performances, exhibitions, projects, learning logs,

journals, graphic organisers, interviews and conferences (Burke, 1996).

Promotes complex thinking and problem solving

The literature on authentic assessment highlights the ways assessment

can be used to promote complex thinking and problem solving. According

to Puckett and Black (1994, pp.25-26) Òthis new era of assessment has

enormous potential for enhancing competencies in communication,

cooperation and critical thinking.Ó (pp.25-26) Integral to authentic

assessment is a focus on requiring and valuing student's use of

evaluation and synthesis of knowledge. Brown (1989, cited in Burke

1996, p.xvii) refers to assessment which has Ògoals of thoughtfulnessÓ

whereby students Òinternalise the capacities to evaluate their

learning, do so as they learn, and do so in ways that exhibit their

capacity to be performing thinkers, problem solvers and inquirers.Ó

Some schools have met this challenge by identifying 'domains and habits

of learning' (Gieske n.d.) which cross traditional subject boundaries

and provide a frame-work against which both teachers and students can

plan and evaluate learning experiences.

Encourages student 'performance' of their learning

McMillan (1997, p.199) emphasises that the defining characteristic of

authentic assessment is to be found in the nature of the performance

task, focussing on, Òa student's ability to use knowledge to perform a

task that is like what is encountered in real life or in the real

world.Ó Similarly, Torrance (1995, p.1) notes that the basic

implication is that performance-based assessment tasks should be more

Òpractical and realisticÓ than traditional assessment devices. Puckett

and Black (1994, p.22) include in their list of essential

characteristics of authentic assessment that it be performance-based

and related to real-life events. Worthen (1993, p.445) adds that

authentic assessment devices, Òrefer to direct examination of student

performance on significant tasks that are relevant to life outside of

the school.Ó This dual focus of performance and relevance to real-life

situations beyond the school dominates the literature.

Engages with issues of equity

Literature that focuses on authentic assessment only occasionally takes

on equity as a major issue ÐÊalthough the issue is often mentioned

tangentially. The most common way of addressing the issue of equity is

to describe traditional approaches to assessment and to point out the

ways that they discriminate against students of difference (so-called

'standardised' testing and tests of basic skills are particularly

described in this regard). Issues such as the atomisation of the

curriculum caused by the identification of discrete skills in multiple

choice/machine scored tests; their tendency to narrow the curriculum as

teachers teach to the test; and the distance of test content from

desirable classroom curriculum are seen to particularly discriminate

against disadvantaged students.

One claim is that, to promote equity, teachers must ensure that the

explicit and formally valued curriculum is accessible to all students

in ways that enhance their opportunities for success. A key way of

attempting this is by developing curricular experiences and assessment

tasks which identify and take into account the student's existing

knowledge and skills, life experiences and 'cultural capital'.

ÒStudents need opportunities to practise performing all assessment

tasks so that they can demonstrate what they know and can do in a

variety of ways and so they build on strengths and expand their

repertoireÓ (Smith & O'Connor 1996, p. 21).

Moll's suggested response to this situation, is to support teachers to

act as researchers to learn about their local school community

strengths or 'funds of knowledge', in order to build on this in school

curriculum. The concept of funds of knowledge and the incorporation of

community members in practices such as assessment 'exhibition's and

other forms of performance as recommended in authentic assessment

literature, may provide the students with a 'known' audience and the

possibility of circumventing presentation difficulties associated with

linguistic and cultural differences.

Several authentic assessment practices incorporate flexibility which

make it possible for teachers and students to negotiate aspects of

learning and assessment such as the scheduling, development and

completion of assessment tasks to take into account social, domestic

and cultural demands.

Forster and Masters (1996, p.6) note that authentic assessment involves

performances, processes and 'doing' activities which necessitate

observation of the students in action. There is a heavy reliance on

anecdotal and interpretive recording. They acknowledge that

Òinter-marker reliabilityÓ is crucial yet problematic. They also note

that informal observation relies heavily on teachers 'seeing',

interpreting and judging. There are no guarantees, however, that

teacher perspectives will be any less or more sensitive to social and

cultural factors than traditional assessment and testing procedures.

The literature on authentic assessment does not appear to address this

issue beyond the hope that because teachers know their students well,

they are potentially more likely to assess sensitively.

Connell (1993) raises real concerns about the impact on students in

poverty of the move to more descriptive assessment practices which

range over many aspects of student's performance.

The more continuous and wide-ranging the assessment, the move intensive

is the surveillance of the child. Pupil records may contain material on

emotional states and refer to family conflicts. These records are used

in 'case consultation's between teachers and social workers... Given

the existing surveillance of poor families by the state, and attempts

at control of their behaviour (now intensifying as governments attempt

'behaviour modification' on the poor via the welfare system) this is

not a minor issue. (Connell 1993, p.81)

Connell (1993, p.83) sees that educators must develop Òan approach to

assessment that is positively equity-based ... an approach which

introduces questions of equity or social justice to the foundation of

our thinking about curriculum and assessment.Ó This involves

recognising that teaching and learning are social processes and that

assessment techniques are not neutral, but have social consequences. It

also means moving away from the understanding of learning as an

individual activity (and assessment as a measure of an individual's

attainment) towards assessment that appraises the social effects of the

teaching and learning process ÐÊthat is outcomes as 'inherently

collective' and not 'the attribute of an individual' (p.84). The

challenge defined by Connell goes to the very core of assumptions about

learning and assessment to argue that assessment processes that address

issues of equity must help teachers re-theorise teaching and learning

and to (re)present student performance in non-individualistic and more

socially located ways Ð a theme which echoes with proposals put by

Moll.

What we learned from the teacher's research about addressing equity

A review of what the schools were able to do reveals the difficulties

that schools face and the kind of support that they need if equity is

to be taken seriously in reform processes. Overall, equity issues

tended not to be the primary focus of school efforts as they began the

process of designing and trialling authentic assessment practices even

though the issue of authentic assessment practices accounting for

equity and dealing with the needs of disadvantaged students was an

important principle identified at the outset of our work. Issues of

finding resources, managing time, linking with other school agendas and

engaging the students tended to take priority. We found that it was

only after the first run at the practice, when the schools reported

three months into the project, that teachers could take time to reflect

on how their practices were working for students who traditionally do

not succeed in school..

This section therefore provides insights into equity based on a first

run at the issue. The lessons presented here demonstrate the potential

of some authentic assessment practices to address long-standing

problems with taken-for-granted approaches to schooling as well as

indicating some important 'health warning's that must be attached to

approaches that were trialled.

Building on student cultural capital

The teachers indicated that some of their practices made it possible

for the students to bring to curriculum and assessment tasks, skills

and knowledge that would not normally be able to be used in traditional

forms of testing. One example of this is reported by McInerney et al

(1997) where McInerney began work on student debates by asking students

to complete a questionnaire on their previous experience and perceived

strengths in the proposed topics. This is an example of a form of

prospective assessment, where knowledge and skills revealed in the

assessment lead into school work, rather than the usual process of

assessment concluding work and summarising achievement. Two of the

school case studies feature claims that a focus on verbal communication

was more likely to work for disadvantaged students because they would

be able to bring their oral skills to bear on the tasks, rather than

relying on literacy. The fact (reported by the teachers in discussions

three months into the projects) that many of these students found that

assessments based on oral communication were no more likely to lead to

success than those based on literacy reveals the complexity of the

issues being addressed here. There is more at work here than simply

oral or written 'skill's. McInerney et al indicate that the formality

of the situations where oral communication was required may have been

the problem ÐÊone of the teacher's moves to include different kinds of

groupwork and different talk situations (eg in the schoolyard) as

'counting' in her assessments provide an indication of some useful

directions to follow.

All of the schools used forms of peer assessment and performance in

ways that ensured students were assessed by those who knew them well.

There is no evidence to indicate whether or not this worked better for

disadvantaged students but such groups do have the potential to

recognise non-traditional skills and knowledge in a way that teachers

may not.

Allowing for flexibility

The work of many of the schools confirmed that the authentic assessment

practices trialled allowed for greater flexibility than traditional

approaches. This aspect appears to be a key element of processes that

may ensure greater success for disadvantaged students. One example from

Seaton illustrates how flexibility may work for students. Sommer

reports that:

there is an element of unpredictability in authentic learning. The

learning situation is often complex and messy. Students bring different

levels of expertise and interests to the task.... some students, and

one boy in particular, spent a lot of valuable time on the masthead

(title of the newspaper) and other aspects of layout. It was essential

to producing the paper and yet he had not produced his agreed article.

Should he have failed? (Seaton Case Study, see section 9)

Sommer reports that because he had an assessment grid that students

completed over the course of the unit of work, he was able to negotiate

with this student that the literacy task was a focus for the next stage

of the project. His assessment was not a pass/fail but an indication of

what needed to be done the next time to meet the overall criteria for

success in the unit. Flexibility here involves the use of an overall

set of criteria that students must meet over an extended period of time

(the time factor allows for flexibility) which provides for multiple

opportunities for students to succeed. The Seaton case study goes on to

expand on the ways that students were provided with multiple

opportunities for success. The teachers’ report using a staged

approach, where skills in earlier activities are re-used in later tasks

so that students have further opportunities to succeed if at first they

have difficulties. All of the case studies indicated that the teachers

built negotiation about content, timing and processes into their

assessment practices. The potential of these elements of flexibility to

work for disadvantaged students clearly warrants further exploration in

research over a longer timespan.

Considering the social effects of teaching

Connell's challenge that equity based assessment involves moving away

from constructions of individual ability towards constructions of

learning as essentially social and group oriented provided the basis of

many useful discussions at various stages of the project.

One of the most direct ways of addressing this construction in the

assessment practices reported in the case-studies involved the teachers

establishing assessments based on a whole group's work rather than an

individual's. Examples of group-based assessments included the grading

of group reports on research by the Holy Eucharist students and the

extensive group reflection and assessment exemplars provided by

Prospect where the teachers extended the concept of group

responsibility by consciously focussing on issues of group

collaboration and teamwork as the teachers attempted to make explicit

for students what collaborative groupwork involved. Such work seems to

provide a practical illustration of the ways that assessment can

recognise that no student’s performance in any area is truly a

reflection of individual work or ability, but involves interaction with

others and that assessments can account for this fact. This is an issue

that also arose in relation to the focus on oral communication at St

Paul's and Henry Kendall. Activities such as an oral presentation to

the class, for example, or completing a group task, can only be

successful if the listeners collaborate and respond in the way the

speaker needs them to. Students who are not popular, or who are

'different' from their peers, are particularly at risk in a classroom

where the assessment focusses on the individual where their failure to

communicate may be 'read off' as a lack of ability. A recognition in

assessment practices that learning is social, on the other hand,

properly calls to account all group participants for each individual's

performance.

A useful way that we came to talk about Connell's challenge was to

conceive of assessment processes as 'constituting' (as in determining

what will count as) performance. In other words it can be said that

assessment constructs rather than measures learning. This perspective

led us to ask the question, ÒWhich students does this approach to

assessment construct as successful and which as failures?Ó This

question proved to be a powerful catalyst at the second conference in

Adelaide for the teachers to reexamine their assessment practices to

consider how they might be contributing to placing particular groups of

students as less successful than their peers. We saw that this process

of setting up some students for failure may be accomplished through the

criteria for success that are established, the practical application of

the assessment process, or even through the assumptions that teachers

make about the resources students have to bring to bear on a task.

The two projects that focussed on verbal communication provided some

immediate issues for discussion related to this issue. At both St

Paul's and at Henry Kendall, it became obvious that the criteria for

assessing students listening or attending skills, that were established

in collaboration with the students, reflected the cultural practices of

only some Australian students. For example, the criterion that

effective listening or attending involves 'eye contact' will clearly

lead to students who come from cultural groups where eye contact is not

appropriate in many social situations, being labelled as poor

performers. Our discussions of the issue revealed that it was probably

not possible to establish a set of criteria for listening or attending

that was universally applicable to all students and all situations. One

teacher, Karen Skelly of St Pauls, had the opportunity after the

conference to pick up on this issue. She reported rethinking the

criteria she had established by thinking about a range of different

situations in which students must listen as a basis for renegotiating

the criteria with the students to make them more situation dependent.

Skelly's work is an illustration of the power of the research process

to support teachers to reconfigure their classrooms to work better for

students who struggle according to mainstream assessment processes. In

this case the reconfiguration involved developing different, and more

inclusive of the student's experience, criteria for success in

communication. Such a process could be extended beyond thinking about

different social situations in the school to consider the ways of

interacting evident in other settings involving a variety of

participants. Certainly this example brought home to the researchers

the ways that social issues could be considered in assessment practices

in ways that make them more authentically account for the increasingly

diverse communities with which schools work.

New lessons about equity

In addition to the directions suggested by the literature, analysis of

the work of the teachers revealed some other approaches as having

potential to address issues of equity. These can be summarised as:

¥ using assessment processes to make the criteria for success more

explicit to students

¥ designing assessment processes that provide built-in support for

student success

¥ focussing on student involvement, activity and engagement as a basis

for students achieving quality outcomes

The teachers made criteria for success explicit by defining,

negotiating and documenting assessment criteria so that students would

understand what was required for success. A number of factors seemed to

drive this concern for explicitness. The complexity and long-term

nature of many of the tasks seemed to require greater explicitness in

order that students could understand what they had to produce as

outcomes. It was also clear that the teachers, in deciding to work on

non-traditional curriculum areas such as oral communication, unusual

projects such as designing an entranceway or organising excursions,

needed to explain to the students what some of these new skills

actually involved. For example, the Holy Eucharist teachers negotiated

in great detail what an informative poster on a planet might contain

and the kinds of headings that could be used. Perhaps, most importantly

from an equity perspective, this meant that students had explained to

them in some detail, school requirements that at other times might

remain quite inexplicit. Thus, just on the issue of 'affective' aspects

of students’ performance in the classroom, the teachers produced three

checklists which detailed what 'attending', 'contributing' and

'acceptance of other's meant. Students rarely have access to such

information Ð we assume they know what 'pay attention' means, for

example. Such explicitness seems to have the potential to overcome some

of the misunderstandings that may lead to trouble in classrooms for

students who don't have 'inside knowledge' on what teacher-speak

actually requires of them.

An unanticipated feature of many of the assessment processes developed

by the schools was the way that they not only involved judgement about

student performance, but they also incorporated a variety of mechanisms

to support successful student performance. The Prospect teachers

reported many initial problems as students began their various quite

complex projects ÐÊproblems caused by lack of planning, coordination,

knowledge and skill. The school responded to these problems by

designing a variety of assessment procedures that forced students to

plan and, especially, to reflect on progress before they moved on. Thus

students used journals to record important decisions and reflect; they

were forced to write written plans and then comment on their progress

towards them as well as evaluating their individual and group

contributions and the kinds of support they needed. These assessment

procedures provided rich information to the teachers about how students

were performing against the key competencies that were the focus for

the unit of work. Significantly they also provided scaffolds for the

students to use in order to display those competencies. A number of

feature of these practices seem likely to benefit disadvantaged

students. The assessments made clear to students the steps along the

way to success (greater explicitness) and they also provided shorter

term feedback about progress. Assessment was not a summative all or

nothing judgement Ð it revealed the students who needed help along the

way, as well as providing opportunities for positive assessments at

least on those parts of the task that the students had been able to

successfully accomplish.

An issue that emerged from a reading across the school reports was the

teacher emphasis on student involvement, activity and engagement. In

their reports the teachers have emphasised a point not often made in

the academic literature but which is crucial to the day to day life of

a classroom Ð that students will not experworks defining valued

knowledge and skills, promotion of school 'choice', as well as calls

for a new stage of schooling Ðthe middle years Ð suited to young

adolescents. 'Authentic' assessment is one of a suite of practices

that is promoted in the name of middle schooling (see for example,

National Schools Network 1997) Along with block scheduling, integrated

curriculum and teacher teaming, authentic assessment fits within a

generally progressivist discourse which seeks to better 'fit' schooling

to young adolescent 'needs.'

In our view it is important to be wary about claims for school reform.

For example, efforts to foster school 'choice', and to make education

more market oriented seem likely to exacerbate existing differential

outcomes from schooling for disadvantaged groups unless new models for

curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are developed which take account of

these new circumstances. In the same way, we believed that claims for

middle schooling, and authentic assessment, need to be examined for

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Wisconsin: National Center for Effective Schools Research and

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ience success unless they are at school and engaged in the learning

activities. It seems clear that one of the advantages that teachers see

in authentic assessment is the flexibility it provides to design

curriculum and assessment tasks that are more likely to engage student's

interests and to involve students in active, performative learning.

While most of the assessment tasks involved students in sitting down at

a desk using a pen and paper, this was typically as an adjunct to

activities that involved students in doing, designing, making, talking

and producing. There is the potential for such an active approach to

engage students who do not succeed in traditional classroom

environments. As the nature of work and leisure changes outside the

school there are very real pressures on teachers to adapt their

curriculum accordingly. The authentic assessment approaches trialled by

the schools seem to offer hope that teachers can adapt their assessment

practices to new, non-traditional kinds of school work for increasingly

diverse student populations.

Conclusion

Our research work with the teachers confirmed the potential of

authentic assessment to allow teachers to adapt their practices to

better meet the needs of students who do not traditionally succeed at

school. These approaches are, however, not without their dangers.

Authentic assessment, if implemented uncritically will probably

maintain the difficulties and lack of success experienced by students

who are disadvantaged by mainstream approaches to curriculum and

assessment. Like all other assessment practices, those associated with

authentic assessment are technologies that must be used with an eye to

their effects on different groups of students, and adapted so that all

students have opportunities to use and build on their cultural

resources.