Authentic Assessment

Okay. So we are looking through all these articles about authentic assessment and I’m thinking all the time that the opposite of authentic is not traditional, but false. Could that be right? Are the assessments I give my students in the classroom false assessments? Early on, as my small group read an article entitled “What is Authentic Assessment,” I noticed an absence of the types of assessments I tend to use. As an English teacher, I avoid what they dubbed forced response tests, things like multiple choice, true false, and fill in the blank. True, I do use them from time to time for vocabulary assessments, but then that’s all I want to know from the kids. Do you know what this word means? Can you figure it out? However, for every two or three vocabulary multiple choice, fill in the blank tests, there is at least one journal assignment requiring my students to use the words, to show creativity as they combine words that would not occur naturally in nature. I mean, ophthalmologist and subterranean? An eye doctor for blind moles? Not bad. Not bad.

The problem with me and authentic assessments is that I feel so stupid. If I worked in a school system that had authentic in its name—Florence School of Authentic Education. We’d be the Florence Fleas. No reason, just like the sound of it. If the push of the entire school or even of the school system were toward authentic assessments, I would be totally on board. Obviously, since I applied to work there. But here . . . I’d be the only teacher doing a mock-courtroom trial alongside To Kill a Mockingbird. It’d be cool, sure. But somehow in my attempt to be authentic, I feel I would go too far into artificial. Doing something that’s authentic just because it’s authentic is no reason to be authentic.

I forgot to support one of the points I made in the first paragraph. What was missing from the definition of Authentic Assessment, at least from my article, was English work. Essays did not fall into the Traditional Assessments no-no list. So are we safe giving out essays? Long answer questions? I mean, that’s authentic enough. At many points in the future lives of our children, they will be required to write responses, explain what happened, give details about how and why they are the best fit for this job or that. That’s authentic, right?

You still have to think in a well-made multiple choice test. What if you made the kids justify their responses on a multiple choice test? Correct and incorrect? Does that then become authentic? I say yes.