Authentic Assessment
NEW: A vision for education and skills at Newcastle University: Education for Life 2030+
What is Authentic Assessment?
Authentic assessment challenges students to apply their learning to tasks that mirror real-world scenarios. It helps students develop and demonstrate skills, knowledge, and attributes that are directly applicable beyond the classroom, preparing them for future careers and life.
Villareol’s (2018) literature review identified three common dimensions of authentic assessment:
- Realism – solving problems relevant to everyday or professional life
- Cognitive challenge – focusing on higher order thinking and applying knowledge
- Evaluative judgement – supporting students to evaluate their own performance
It is important to state that authentic assessment has wider social applicability (McArthur, 2023) and need not be linked solely to discipline-specific employability skills.
Through authentic assessments students often create diverse outputs; work with uncertainty and reflect on their learning.
Why use authentic assessment?
The benefits of authentic assessment include:
- Quality and depth of learning
- Development of higher cognitive skills
- Increased autonomy, motivation, and commitment
- Better self-regulation, metacognition, and self-reflection
Authentic assessment aligns closely with our Education for Life strategy aims:
- Encounters with the Leading Edge: Authentic assessments incorporate cutting-edge research, industry practices, and real-world scenarios into the curriculum, offering students meaningful experiences that connect their learning to future workplace demands.
- Fit for the Future: These assessments develop essential skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and self-regulation, ensuring students are well-prepared for the challenges of modern workplaces and society.
- Equity: By designing assessments that cater to diverse needs and experiences, authentic assessment ensures equitable access and opportunities for all learners, regardless of their background, nationality, or study mode. This inclusivity helps all students discover and achieve their potential.
Examples of Authentic Assessment
- Responding to a scenario: Students analyse and respond to realistic situations, often with incomplete information and competing priorities. These assessments develop analytical thinking and decision-making skills within authentic constraints.
- Project based assessment: Students undertake substantial projects that result in tangible products or solutions to real-world problems, often working over an extended period.
- Performance based assessment: Students demonstrate skills through direct performance, often in front of an audience or panel of assessors.
- Simulations and role plays: Students participate in structured experiences that replicate professional situations, allowing them to practice skills in a controlled environment.
- Client based projects: Students work with actual clients (businesses, community organizations, etc.) to solve problems or meet specific needs.
- Professional resources: Students create documents, tools, or resources that professionals in their field regularly produce.
Designing Authentic Assessment
Authenticity exists on a spectrum, you don’t need to create perfectly authentic tasks to gain the benefit of this approach to assessment.
- Start with your module learning outcomes
- Identify a plausible context – one that is faithful to your discipline or subject area; this could be a client scenario; a recent news item; a workplace issue
- Define the format of the output and the intended audience – you may wish to give students choice
- Define clear assessment criteria for the task; if it is group task make it clear whether you are assessing the product or the process.
- Give students the opportunity to respond to feedback. Consider how this could mirror disciplinary or professional practice.
- Build in reflection. Depending on the nature of the task, you may wish to include opportunities to reflect on important elements eg decision making, how they overcame challenges, the skills and attributes they developed.
Authentic assessment and collaborative working
While authentic tasks can be set for individuals, there are many benefits of implementing authentic assessment for groups.
Collaborative working:
- Reflects the workplace: most professional environments require collaboration across teams and departments.
- Develops essential professional skills: students have opportunities to develop and demonstrate communication, negotiation, prioritisation and time management, accountability and reliability
- Enables more complex realistic projects: Working in teams allows students to undertake larger, more sophisticated projects that would be impractical for individuals. This better simulates the complexity of real-world challenges and allows for more authentic deliverables.
- Peer learning: students can learn from each other drawing on their different strengths and perspectives. Their combined backgrounds and experiences enables more diverse ideation and internal feedback.
- Supports reflective practice: Collaborative work requires students to explain their thinking, defend their ideas and consider alternative ideas.
AI and Authentic Assessment
It is widely accepted that AI will continue to grow in importance as a common workplace tool. In 2024, 73% of students surveyed by HEPI expected to use AI after completing their studies. Therefore, the ability to critically use and harness Generative AI is an essential skill, one that students can develop through assessment tasks that are designed to encourage AI use.
See our AI in Assessment page for ideas on authentic coursework activities that include AI by design along with our AI and Assessment Ideas Deck.
NUReflect
NU Reflect provides the tools to support personal, professional and academic reflection:
- Structured reflection: NU Reflect provides templates and frameworks that guide students through the reflective process. This helps them critically analyse their learning experiences, skills, and development.
- Skill development: students can track and categorise their skills against frameworks, ensuring they are meeting the necessary competencies for their programme.
- Portfolio creation: By compiling their reflections, students can create comprehensive portfolios that showcase their learning journey and achievements. These portfolios can be used for both academic assessment and professional development. To find out more watch this short video on portfolio development in NU Reflect.
For more information on NU Reflect, visit NU Reflect | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University
Buddycheck for peer evaluation
Buddycheck is a Canvas integrated tool which allows students’ to peer evaluate group work contributions.
As a peer evaluation tool Buddycheck allows students to evaluate contributions of their group members providing feedback for assessors.
Buddycheck’s peer evaluation allows for:
- Real-world relevance: students engage in providing constructive feedback on others work.
- Responsibility and accountability: this encourages students, as part of the group work, to take responsibility for their contribution and be accountable due to peer scoring impact on individual grades.
- Reflection: during the process, self scores are captured which also encourages self reflection skill enhancement.
For further details please see Buddycheck | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University
Authentic tasks in Digital Exams
Inspera, our University Digital Exam system has a number of features to make it possible to include authentic tasks in an exam setting. Examples include case study-based scenarios, role play and simulation style assessment questions.
- Video based Digital Exams: incorporating medical based videos into Digital Exams has become a valuable part of authentic assessments, designed to engage students in interpreting, analysing and applying learning in practical ways
- Audio based Digital Exams: including audio clips within phonetics based Digital Exams mimics practical tasks students may face in the field
- Keyboard Language altering based Digital Exams: within language courses, changing the keyboard language to match the language being assessed allows students to type using the target language, using correct characters and accents. There is a case study all about this method.
- Open resources: Inspera Digital Exams can be created so certain resources, such as data sets or access to specialized software (i.e. SPSS) can be accessed during a Digital Exam. Allowing students to use tools which are used in real-world professions demonstrates real world application.
Inspera is a digital exam platform enabling locked down exams to take place on campus. For more information see Inspera | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University
H5P
H5P is a powerful tool that can be used to create interactive and engaging online content through a simple user interface.
H5P allows you to create a wide range of different types of interactive content, which could be used to scaffold elements of authentic assessments or provide opportunties for formative practice. In particular the branching scenario can be used to create intricate real-world scenarios with multiple outcomes, use the following link for some examples https://h5p.org/branching-scenario.
For more information about getting started with H5P please visit H5P | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University
References
- McArthur, J. Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society. High Educ85, 85–101 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00822-y
- Pitt, E. and Quinlan, K.M., 2022. Impacts of higher education assessment and feedback policy and practice on students: a review of the literature 2016-2021.(Advance HE)
- Villarroel, V., Bloxham, S., Bruna, D., Bruna, C., & Herrera-Seda, C. (2017). Authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(5), 840–854, available from the Newcastle University Library