Two sides of the same coin: authentic assessment

Berg: What do you mean?

Harris: Writing itself can be a type of authentic assessment. But it would require students going through a process of researching and revising and getting peer feedback and then coming up with a final paper. Whether they presented that paper orally or not is something that a teacher would decide. Either case would be an authentic situation. Writing can be authentic assessment. But you are also looking for a performance element in authentic assessment. Think about science labs. Science labs have always been authentic assessment because students are given a real problem which they have to figure out how to solve. I think that other disciplines - English or history, for example - have been slower to come to that type of performance based assessment and evaluation.

Berg: A week ago we were together at the LAND Student Scholars Conference. Rather than just have students submit their papers this semester, I could make the assessment more authentic by giving the students the guidelines to submit their papers far next year's conference.

Harris: Exactly. Because they are also getting validation outside of your classroom and experience outside of your classroom. Perhaps they are also working in a team which would be part of that, so they are doing investigation and performance and writing, too. They have an audience outside of you and it helps them develop all of those higher level skills. When you are on the job, typically you are not producing information just for your boss. It is going to go somewhere else for some purpose.

Berg: Students who understand their audience are going to be the students who perform best at work.

Harris: Absolutely. I want to say one other thing about why we are doing this assessment. I think we also need to go a step beyond the classroom, even to legislative levels because legislatures-such as Michigan's -are trying to tie funding for schools to assessment and outcomes. If we aren't categorizing and classifying and focusing on student learning outcomes we are going to lose funding, and that is something that is beyond the control of a classroom teacher. So whether you like the idea of assessment or whether you think we should be doing it or not, we are going to be required to do it or we will lose money. That is a less pleasant aspect, but it is a real one. And I am not sure it is much different than that real world situation we are asking students to fit into. Faculty need to participate in real world situations, too.

Berg: I would rather work with my colleagues to develop good assessment techniques than to have the legislature tell me what to do.

Harris: I don't want legislators involved in my classroom any more than they have to be.

Berg: But don't we need to consider the outside world when writing course objectives and designing assessments?

Harris: Yes we do. Our board of trustees establishes associate degree outcomes: the skills that students should have when they graduate from Jackson Community College. That is a board mandated issue. We tie our assessments to courses for those associate degrees. We have the college mission statement. We have the departmental mission statement. We have the associate degree outcomes. Then we have the specific outcomes that our specific courses will address. This is a multilevel task and all of the pieces fit together.