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How to define 'authentic assessment'

A variety of definitions of the term 'authentic assessment' are offered by a variety of educational sites.  There is little obvious clarity in definitions of the term itself.  Such discussions seem only to bear out the observation made by Whitelock & Cross (2012) that it is difficult to define the term, though they suggest that such assessment involves the demonstration of "candidates real life performance skills in the course of the examination rather than the elicitation of inert knowledge" (Whitelock, 2011, cited 2012, p 3). This division would seem to mirror Sfard's 'acquisition vs participation metaphor of learning.

There seems to be more clarity about what format 'authentic assessments' might come in - for instance (Whitelock & Wiggins, 2012; Wiggins, 1990):

• Collaboration
• Simulations (role plays, scenarios)
• Authentic assessments require students to be effective performers with acquired (and contextualised) knowledge.
• Present the student with a full array of tasks e.g. conducting research; writing, revising and discussing papers; providing an engaging oral analysis of a recent political event; collaborating with others on a debate, etc.
• Encourages thorough and justifiable answers, performances or products.
• Examinations take place in 'real world settings
• 'In tune' with disciplinary mind.
• There would seem to be a few issues herein. One is the lack of any real examination of the term 'authentic', which is surely a value judgement based upon social constructivist pedagogy. There is nothing wrong with this, though failure to examine first precepts is not a good principle. The concept of what constitutes 'authentic' assessment would also seem to be slanted more to the (hard) sciences and not to fit the (soft) iterative disciplines as easily, though they surely need consideration of assessment tasks just as much. However, how might one apply 'problem tasks that are like those encountered by practitioners or experts in the field' or 'examinations that take place in real world settings' to history, for instance?

References

Wiggins, Grant (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 2(2). Retrieved July 18, 2013 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=2&n=2

Whitelock, D. (2011) 'Activating assessment for learning: are we on the way with Web 2.0?' in Lee, M.J.W. and McLoughlin, C. (eds) Web 2.0-based eLearning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching, Hershey, PA, IGI Global, pp. 319-42.

The 3 articles I have read from the OER reading list were differentiated in date, but included 2 (Hatakka, 2009)  and (Wilson and McAndrew , 2009) as being among the most recent on the list.  The third article read in detail was  Atkins, Seely-Brown and Hammond (2007).

All  3 articles included a definition of the notion of OER:  to provide free access to educational materials, and sharing resources, and 'creating new knowledge rather than reinventing the same resource a number of times in different places' (Atkins,Wilson & McAndrew, 2009).  The Atkins et al report was more general in scope, although commissioned by one of the earlier supporters of OER (Hewlett Foundation) and aimed to describe the development of OER to date, to note the 'major remaining challenges' and to identify the key 'enablers' in the (near) future.  Wilson and McAndrew focussed upon one particular learning environment - 'OpenLearn' as a case study of how educators' use of OER might be improved, and in particular to examine the 'gap' between the open content resources available and the possible 're-purposing of such resources by educators.  Hatakka's study focuses upon the issue of why educators in developing countries were not making use of OERs.

Between the 3 articles it was quite striking that they did not necessarily identify the same issues as being (the most) important.   The 3 issues which I have identified as (potentially) significant are:

• Relevance - content was the original focus of much of the early attempts to foster 'open content', with the underlying presumption that such content was pedagogically 'neutral'. More recent research focuses upon the 'content + context' as being a fundamentally pairing - open content created for one context is likely to be either inappropriate or not usable in another context, whether it is another country, another educational system or level, or another language context.
• Awareness, access and digital literacy - it is difficult for both educators and students alike to know where to find suitable 'open source' resources (whether in terms of course/level appropriateness or 'quality' of the content) from the wealth of sources available on the internet at any one time, or perhaps even to know about the existence of some 'open source' sites which could be accessed.
• Intellectual property issues - institutional use of materials is generally within the bounds of the university community (or VLE) and so covered by institutional licences, but such permissions would not usually cover open access. Educators might be (are?) reluctant to create materials which would run into copyright problems, and/or would be users might be anxious about how to download materials and re-use them legally. If the aim of OER is to enable a by-passing of the expense of developing new courses from scratch by re-purposing learning materials this must be a key issue.

If  intellectual property issues is taken as an example, then there are a few ways in which this is being addressed.  A Creative Commons Search provides a gateway to  services provided by organisations under this licence (though not necessarily only such institutions), while in the UK further and higher education institutions current share 'open' learning and teaching resources via Jorum, and  some individual universities such as Nottingham host open source repositories (Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory)  which will help educators to search a growing database of open learning resources suitable for students at all levels of study in a wide range of different subjects.   On an individual level the educator can  access those online services which provide access to Web 2.0 open educational resources e.g.  Flickr (images), YouTube (video), Scribd (the written word) and iTunes U (educational materials).

References

Atkins, D.E., Seely-Brown, J. and Hammond, A.L. (2007) A Review of the Open educational resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges and new opportunities. Report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Available from www.hewlett.org/uploads/files/Hewlett_OER_report.pdf (Accessed  30 March 2013)

Hatakka, M. (2009) Build it and they will come? - Inhibiting factors for reuse of open content in developing countries. In The Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries (2009), Vol. 37, No. 5, pp 1-16.  Available from www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/545/279 (Accessed on 30 March 2013)

JISC (2013) A Guide to Open Educational Resources [online]. Available from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2013/Openeducationalresources.aspx (Accessed on 1 April 2013)

Wilson, T. and McAndrew, P. (2009) Evaluating how Higher Education Institutions world-wide plan to use and adapt Open Educational Resources. In International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED 2009), 9-11 March, Valencia, Spain.  Available from http://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/mew3.html#group_2009 (Accessed on 30 March 2013)