Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Authentic Tasks

Authentic Tasks: "An assignment given to students designed to assess their ability to apply standard-driven knowledge and skills to real-world challenges." This would seem to be the obvious way to assess what students have learned, but most assessment is almost wildly inauthentic. I loved the simple comparison chart:

Traditional ------------------------------------ Authentic
Selecting a Response -------------------------- Performing a Task
Contrived -------------------------------------- Real-life
Recall/Recognition ----------------------------- Construction/Application
Teacher-structured ---------------------------- Student-structured
Indirect Evidence ------------------------------ Direct Evidence

This came in a roundabout way from Mario Asselin, who's doing an amazing portfolio/weblog initiative at his school in Quebec. I wish I knew enough French to get the flavour of the student portfolios and figure out how the program is working so far.

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