Authentic Assessment



This is not authentic assessment.

The Almighty finger writes:

I was the type of kid whose brain would mysteriously short-circuit the moment big words were tossed around. This is a habit that has unhappily followed me into adulthood, and I still have the occasional moment where I find something far more interesting for a moment and space and time cease to have any meaning to me. Authentic assessment is intended to counteract such rarely occurring phenomena. But, you ask, what is Authentic Assessment? Grading the kids in a better way?

Authentic assessment, the Optimist Prime Movers decided, is a way to teach and test and help students engage with with worthy real world problems with real world solutions that have some menaing or relevance to their lives.

Jon Mueller defines authentic assessment as "a form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills.

"Bad" Brad McMath described his infomercial project wherein his eighth grade history students had to script and record their own Thirteen Colonies infomercial. In each infomercial, the students had to present a colony and why you should move from your cramped, smelly European city to the wonderful, wide-open stretches of the Americas. It worked better than a lecture, he admitted, and the students scored higher on their tests because they all collaborated on each other's projects, thus learning by exposure.

The students were tested on their own abilities, because group projects can be challenging. McMath admits he only lets his students do group projects when it is avoidable, simply because he otherwise has to deal with putting them into groups which they may dislike to varying degrees, parents who complain of the time necessary, or the inevitable slackers who coattail their way through the work.

Other examples of equally successful authentic assessment would be Miriam Written Word's weekly drama performances, where students work with a partner in a skit during the week and critique each other's performance in Groups. The Almighty Gabriel's sixth grade radio plays, where students had to script a radio play, edit, turn in a second draft, hire actors for their play, perform, direct, add sound effects, and finally produce a complete work. "It's so hard," these students said and added in the same breath, "can we do more projects like this?"

For some inexplicable reason, the notekeeper of the Optimist Prime Movers has written in her notes,  "McMath hates the world." This cannot be deciphered, and we must simply take her word for it.