Authentic Assessment
At TU Dublin, Authentic Assessments are:
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Meaningful challenging assessments designed to develop the attributes, capabilities and professional skills that prepare our students to become effective life-wide learners and responsible global citizens. |
Authentic assessment is both authentic to the world beyond education and authentic to the learning that matters within it. It asks students to engage with meaningful challenges and provides valid evidence of capabilities that have value beyond completing the assessment itself. Put simply, authentic assessment is not just about testing what students know for a grade; it focuses on what students can do with their learning in contexts that matter, demonstrating skills, knowledge, and achievements that will remain useful in their future studies, work, and everyday lives.
TU Dublin's Authentic Assessment Framework is comprised of four ‘dimensions’ of authenticity:
Realism
Authentic assessments place learners in realistic scenarios or tasks that reflect the real-world challenges they'll face in their profession or daily life.
This involves designing assessment tasks that mimic, resemble, or have some degree of fidelity to the challenges, practices, and contexts of the ‘real world’, particularly of employment. ‘Real-world’ assessment has, in many contexts, become almost synonymous with authentic assessment, with authenticity sometimes understood primarily in terms of how closely an assessment resembles professional practice or settings beyond education.
Cognitive Challenge
Assessments not only resemble real-world problems and tasks but also mirror the intellectual rigor of real-life situations, prompting learners to think deeply, reason flexibly, and respond to complexity with insight and creativity.
Authentic assessments ask learners to do more than recall what they know. They ask them to use their knowledge in meaningful and challenging ways, for example, by applying and connecting ideas, tackling complex problems, making judgements, or developing solutions where there may be no single right answer.
Critical Reflection
Assessments simulate real-world decision-making and professional autonomy by encouraging learners to make informed choices about how they approach tasks, helping them to reflect on their thinking and evaluate their own learning.
Authentic assessments give learners opportunities to reflect on and think about their own learning (metacognition). They might make choices about how to approach a task, monitor how they are progressing, judge the quality of their work, and identify how they could improve. In this way, authentic assessment can help learners become more independent and better able to make informed decisions about their own work and learning.
Feedback Processes
Assessments engage learners in processes of providing, receiving, and enacting feedback in ways that resemble those of their discipline, profession, workplace, or other life-wide learning setting.
Authentic assessment gives learners opportunities to give, receive and use feedback in ways that reflect what happens beyond university. This might include peer review, discussing work with others, responding to critique, or seeking feedback from people with relevant expertise. The aim is to help learners become confident in using feedback to improve their work and performance, both during their studies and beyond.
The TU Dublin's Authentic Assessment Toolkit Toolkit provides resources to guide programme teams and individuals to consider:
- What is Authentic Assessment?
- Why use Authentic Assessment?
- Developing an Authentic Assessment
- Developing a Continuum of Authenticity across a Programme
- Workshops
This Authentic Assessment Toolkit draws upon work completed as part of the QQI funded ProfASSESS project. Prof-Assess aimed to develop a programme-based approach to building authenticity into assessment and feedback processes through engagement with external stakeholders, including Professional, Regulatory and Statutory Bodies (PRSBs).
A sub-set of the Toolkit is available as a downloadable booklet: TU Dublin Authentic Assessment Toolkit Book.
- Wiggins, G. (1989). A True Test: Toward More Authentic and Equitable Assessment. The Phi Delta Kappan, 70(9), 703–713. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20404004
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Archbald, D. A., & Newmann, F. M. (1988). Beyond Standardized Testing: Assessing Authentic Academic Achievement in the Secondary School. National Center on Effective Secondary Schools. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED301587.pdf
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Villarroel, V., Bloxham, S., Bruna, D., Bruna, C., & Herrera-Seda, C. (2018). Authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(5), 840–854. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1412396
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Arnold, L. (2022, November 14). Expanded assessment top trumps [PDF]. Lydia Arnold. https://lydiaarnold.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/authentic-assessment-top-trumps-2022.pdf
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Ashford-Rowe, K., Herrington, J., & Brown, C. (2014). Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(2), 205–222. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.819566
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National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. (2017). Authentic assessment in Irish higher education. National Resource Hub. https://hub.teachingandlearning.ie/resource/authentic-assessment-in-irish-higher-education/
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