Assessment Toolkit
Q5: How do I help students apply their learning in meaningful ways?
Continuing with the six questions to guide your assessment design:
How do I help students apply thier learning in meaningful ways?
- How do I ensure I am assessing what students need to learn?
- How do I make assessments clear and fair for students?
- How do I give students opportunities to practice, get feedback, and improve?
- How do I support students take ownership of their learning?
- How do I help students apply their learning in meaningful ways?
- How do I design assessments that support student well-being?
Q5: How do I help students apply their learning in meaningful ways?
Summary: Authentic assessment is assessment that reflects how the learning is demonstrated in the community or profession, and can have up to three elements of authenticity:
- Authentic conditions: The students have the types of tools (resources, technology, etc.) they would have in the “real world” when they do the skill or demonstrate the understanding.
- Authentic context: The variables that will impact performance are present in the assessment, like complex evolving information, a live audience, or group that will be using what the students make. This might also be called an authentic situation.
- Authentic assessors: The people grading the assessment aren’t the course educators, they are people who do this task regularly.
Common authentic assessments include case base learning, labs and clinics, performance and showcases, community partnerships, open pedagogy, and experiential learning activities, such as placements, rotations, and internships.
Resources to Support
Implementing into your course: Our disciplines play important roles in the fabric of our society. Well-designed assessments help students to think like members of our disciplines and professions and use the types of skills they will use when they graduate.
Quick win: Replace one hypothetical example in an assignment with a real-world case, dataset, or scenario from the discipline.
USask Resources
- Authentic assessment – Overview
- AI and authentic assessment - Article
- Experiential learning – Overview
- Understanding the USask Experiential Learning Framework - Video
Course Alignment Ideas
Educators can create more authentic assessments by:
- Designing assignments that reflect how knowledge is used in the discipline or profession.
- Using real-world cases, data, scenarios, or problems when possible.
- Having students create products that resemble professional practice, such as reports, presentations, proposals, designs, or portfolios.
- Asking students to explain their reasoning and decision-making processes.
- Incorporating community, workplace, research, or field-based contexts when appropriate.
- Providing opportunities for teamwork when collaboration reflects disciplinary practice.
- Evaluating skills and knowledge as they are integrated in authentic contexts.
- Inviting students to consider the audience who would use or benefit from their work.
Common Concerns & Related Literature:
While some formats (like labs or placements) do, changing exams questions to include complex variables, or using case studies, undergraduate research, critique, and problem-based learning are course-based and can be foundational to the discipline without requiring more time or money.
Where it is more time consuming, like labs or placements, colleges often have additional supports to help.
It is often true that assessors of the same thing grade it differently, sometimes even without knowing why, and articulating they know “good” when they see it.
In experiential learning, this can most significant when preceptors (members of the profession) assess students from the university. Having a common process to agree what “good” looks like and conditions you might see it in is an essential annual process to ensure that assessment has good inter-rater reliability (producing the same result in the same circumstances).
Often there is more openness to working on inter-rater reliability in applied professional settings than there is academia, both in both cases, time and autonomy remain concerns.
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Big ideas |
Literature |
|---|---|
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Authentic assessment |
Foundational: Wiggins (1990) Conceptual: Ajjawi (2023) How to: Villarroel (2017) Literature review: Sokhanvar (2021) |
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Experiential learning |
Foundation: Kolb’s experiential learning cycle |
Next Question in the Toolkit
Question 6: How do I design assessments that support student well-being?
The Assessment Toolkit: 6 Questions to guide your assessment design.
- How do I ensure I am assessing what students need to learn?
- How do I make assessments clear and fair for students?
- How do I give students opportunities to practice, get feedback, and improve?
- How do I support students take ownership of their learning?
- How do I help students apply their learning in meaningful ways? (current page)
- How do I design assessments that support student well-being?
Get Support
- Attend GMCTL workshops to learn about the Assessment Principles and how to use within your course.
- Book a one-to-one consultation with GMCTL experts who can help you design a full assessment consistent with the principles for your course.