Authenticity In Assessment Demands

By Author: Jordon
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The task demands in the newspaper ad make a further point about authentic writing: say it concisely, have great empathy for Cartier Replica your client/audience, and pay close attention to context. In other words: get serious, really serious, about Audience and Purpose. That's what "authentic assessment" in the teaching of writing amounts to: ensure that students have to write for real audiences and purposes, not just the teacher in response to generic prompts.
Twenty years ago I wrote a widely cited paper on authentic assessment in which I proposed a rationale for authentic assessment and offered a set of criteria by which we might distinguish authentic from inauthentic assignments (Wiggins). Here is a summary of the criteria I proposed:
1. Engaging and worthy tasks of importance, in which students must use knowledge effectively and creatively to achieve a result. The tasks are either SeaWorld or replicas and analogous to the kinds of tasks faced by professionals in the field, adult citizens, and/or consumers.
2. Faithful representation ...
... of the contexts facing workers in a field of study, or the real-life "tests" of adult life. The options, constraints, and access to resources are appropriate, not arbitrary. In particular, excessive secrecy and unrealistic limits on resources, methods, and time are minimized: the student has appropriate opportunity to clarify the task, plan, rethink, consult, rehearse, and revise.
3. No routine and multistage tasks—real problems. Recall or "plugging in" is insufficient. The challenge requires thoughtful and methodical use of a repertoire of knowledge and skill—understanding and good judgment.
4. Tasks that require the student to produce a quality product and/or performance, for a real or realistic audience and purpose. The criteria should thus relate to achieving the appropriate effects—the "doing" of English or math well.
5. Transparent or demystified criteria and standards. Any realistic test presumes self-assessment and self-adjustment by the student. The standards and criteria by which the work will be assessed are thus fully knowable in advance. Questions and tasks may be discussed, clarified, and even appropriately modified through discussion with or formative feedback from one's "audience." Clearly, these are not esoteric conditions. English teachers in good schools have typically had far less difficulty with these criteria than, say, math and history teachers when working over the decades in helping faculties design courses and units of study. But English teachers often have too narrow a sense of what constitutes a realistic challenge for causing a genuine effect in developing writing prompts and scoring rubrics.
Real writers are trying to make a difference, find their true audience, and cause some result in that readership. Yet academic writing is notoriously turgid, arguably because the impact of the prose is too often an afterthought, the writing a mere vehicle for offering up new knowledge. Yet, if we are to judge by the bulk of secondary school writing assignments—namely, assignments to find out if you read the book ("Was Oedipus fated to go blind?") or aimless prompts ("Write about a time when you were wrong.")—we would assume that students are writing for no purpose or person.
But the point is to open the mind or heart of a real audience—cause a fuss, achieve a feeling, start some thinking. In other words, what few young writers learn is that there are consequences for succeeding or failing as a real writer. You get the job for J. Walter Thompson or you don't. You make the reader laugh or cry or you don't, with consequences for the world, your ego, and your pocketbook.
There is thus an irony here: in the real world, Audience and Purpose matter in ways that school often shields writers from. "Purpose" in school is usually completely absent ("Here's your homework; this is the prompt") or artificial ("Write an editorial" but to no particular newspaper or with no personal motive or stake). There is no real difference to be caused, so there is no purpose. Is it Tag Heuer Replica Watches any wonder, then, that so many school papers are—let us be brave and say it—boring and perfunctory? School writing doesn't have to be "fresh and fearless, and more or less brilliant." It just has to be on topic, handed in on time, and be four—five pages.
Thus, this is more our fault than we care to recognize. Since the only "effect" a student tends to worry about is the contrived one of the letter grade, and since most rubrics typically demand that the writing be merely compliant (even if it is as boring as hell), we earn the predictable consequences: dreary and safe writing—the opposite of fresh and fearless. Students know they can get a decent grade for perfunctory work; they too often find out that risky rhetorical choices will be punished. We teachers thus rarely find the courage to face up to the fact that the writing we caused is so little fun to read. What was our purpose? Who is our audience?