Written by Maria Yarosh and Pablo Beneitone, CALOHEA Coordination Team
Authentic assessment asks students to perform tasks similar, if not identical, in nature, to what they can be expected to perform in the real world. At lower levels, authentic assessment tasks permit students to actually enhance their knowledge, skills and competences through completing the tasks, and is, thus, both informative of the students’ current developmental level and conducive to learning.
Authentic assessment judges students’ performance against criteria that are relevant beyond a concrete classroom situation, thus, helping students to develop ability to judge their own work in the way that will be helpful for them beyond university – in the professional setting and other everyday situations.
Finally, authentic assessment brings together more than one “voice”: it engages students in self- and/or peer-assessment and seeks to include voices of those not present in the classroom, but who will later on judge graduates’ performance (e.g. employers) and benefit or suffer from graduates’ performance (e.g. clients, members of the society).
34 Teams have worked in the framework of the CALOHEA Erasmus+ project to design and implement institutional action plans focused on promoting the use of authentic assessment. Check the CALOHEA project website – https://calohea.org/ – to find the CALOHEA experts in authentic assessment in your country.
The CALOHEA Erasmus+ project is coordinated by the Tuning Academy of the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and the ASEAN University Network and is co-funded by the European Commission.
