Teaching Experiences of E-Authentic Assessment: Lessons Learned in Higher Education

Abstract

The realities of the 21st century have led professors and lecturers to renew their learning assessment practices so that they are more adapted to and contextualized in the current professional world. Despite advances in teaching and learning, assessment methods may still deviate from practice in authentic contexts. Although some instructors are already familiar with more authentic assessments, most are accustomed to using exams as standard practices to test students’ achievement of course objectives and essays to prepare students for research or written argumentation. Despite their benefits, such typical assessments often lack authenticity and do not develop the full potential of students’ 21^st-century learning or literacy skills such as communication, creativity, or working with technologies. Over the past decade, we have been witnessing the beginnings of a broader reflection on teaching, learning, and evaluating with technologies, including more authentic assessments. This reflective essay will present how technologies make it possible to diversify assessment methods, resulting in enhanced authenticity and development of 21^st-century learning and literacy skills. Authentic assessment methods with technologies will be illustrated, e.g., recorded video presentations, explanatory interviews with descriptive assessment grids, PechaKucha presentations, blog posts, and social media and e-portfolios, with examples from several disciplines. Authors will also explain how proposing a number of methods to students for the same assessment may help answer their various needs and preferences without increasing instructors’ grading load. Furthermore, authors will discuss how diversifying assessment methods with technologies often results in a transformation of assessment modalities. Beyond assessments as an evaluation of knowledge and/or skills at a fixed schedule, authentic assessments with technologies may become continuous or iterative processes with multiple feedbacks from instructors, thereby combining synchronous interactions and/or discussions with asynchronous reflections to improve students’ involvement and active learning.