Authentic assessment is a student-centered approach to assessment that benefits learning by connecting course material, assessment, and application.

Students benefit from:

• Deeper engagement and higher intrinsic motivation due to connection to students’ lives, interests, and the wider community.
  • Intrinsic motivation and engagement can be useful in contexts where instructors are encouraging students not to use generative AI tools.
• Building higher-order thinking skills and skills like communication and critical thinking that are authentic both to their future careers and their lives as a whole.
• Receiving feedback that improves their learning and helps them progress. Wiggins (1998) states that authentic assessments “produce useful feedback so that students can progressively improve their understanding and performance, that is, their application of subject-matter content” (12).
• Having multiple ways to represent learning. Authentic assessments often facilitate variety in assignment design that allows students to “demonstrate their learning in a number of ways and from multiple perspectives.”
• Producing artifacts that they may be able to use in portfolios, resumes, etc.

Instructors benefit from:

• A more holistic view of student learning through demonstration of multiple higher-ordering thinking skills.
• A more direct measure of the application of learning.
• Connecting course objectives, course content, and assessment.

Authentic assessments come in a number of different types and forms. University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence provides detailed descriptions of inquiry-based, problem-based, scenario-based, project-based, and design-based learning on their Authentic Assessments page.

Types of authentic assessment include:

• Case studies
• Clinical scenarios
• Exhibitions or art collections
• Open-book assessments (see LSA’s Enhancing Learning through Authentic Assessment for more)
• Peer and self-assessment (see LSA’s Enhancing Learning through Authentic Assessment for more)
• Podcasts or videos
• Portfolios
• Problem-based learning
• Research projects simulating empirical research in the course’s field
• Simulations
• Writing projects tailored to an audience pertinent to the course’s field (e.g., a policy brief that might be shared with a legislator)

Examples of different types of authentic assessment

For a list of examples of potential authentic assessments in a variety of fields, see the “Examples of Authentic Assessments” section on Indiana University’s Authentic Assessments page.

There may also be pertinent examples in the National Institute of Learning Outcomes Assessment’s Assignment Library, though many of the assignments are from before the pandemic.

Case studies:

• Case studies about sustainability (U-M SEAS)
• Case consortium for “journalism, public policy, public health, and other disciplines” (Columbia University)
• Teaching Case Studies from the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research, (Prevention and Population Health Teaching Modules, Education for Health: Population Health Models, Case-Based Series in Population-Oriented Prevention, CDC Case Studies in Applied Epidemiology, Instructor Guides)

Exhibitions or art collections:

• UMMA can work with faculty to build collections for courses, tours, or self-guided engagements that can inspire students' own projects or collections for a course project.

Podcasts:

• “Learner-generated podcasts: an authentic and enjoyable assessment for students working in pairs” (Wakefield et al. 2022)

Portfolios:

• Portfolios section of CRLT’s 2017 Provost’s Seminar on Teaching materials

Problem-based learning:

• Partnerships with local organizations or industry professionals to work on issues or projects
• The Learning by Giving Foundation provides funding for students to award to nonprofit organizations in their local communities

Simulations:

• PolicyMaker (developed by the Center for Academic Innovation and the UM School of Public Policy)

One of the biggest challenges associated with authentic assessments is time and effort involved in designing and grading them. Feedback for and grading of authentic assessments is often more involved than for a multiple choice or short answer test and can be more complex because authentic assessments often have more than one right answer.

For a guide to creating authentic assessments, see Mueller’s Authentic Assessment Toolbox.

The tips that follow may help streamline the designing and grading process.

• Consider what authenticity means broadly for your course. Authenticity can go beyond the world of work; consider social value as well as value to future careers.
• As with any assessment, be transparent about expectations around assignments, including grading criteria, timing of submissions if there will be more than one, and expectations around use or non-use of AI tools.
• Get feedback from students about assignment processes, perception of authenticity of the task, and whether links to course objectives are clear.
• Build a rubric and/or grading criteria alongside the assignment. For more on rubrics, see:
  • CRLT’s Grading with Rubrics and Grading Standards
  • Online Teaching at Michigan’s Rubrics page
  • Indiana University’s Tips for Rubric Creation and Use
  • University of Illinois Chicago’s Expectations and Grading for Authentic Assessments section

When designing authentic assessments, consider the following reflective questions (adapted from Columbia University’s CTL):

• What should students know and/or have the ability to do when they leave your course? (i.e., what are your course objectives?)
• What will students be doing with the knowledge or skills they learn in your course? (i.e., what kinds of activities outside the classroom use those knowledge or skills?)
• What assignments can you build to reflect those activities? If you already have an existing assignment in mind, how does it connect with the knowledge, skills, and/or objectives you listed previously?

In addition to the above reflections, consider how generative AI might come into the assignment. What type of framing will you need to do around the use of GenAI elements (e.g., pointing back to a syllabus statement, explaining how GenAI is integrated into the assignment). With its increasing use of GenAI in various fields, GenAI elements can also serve as an authentic element. Be transparent about how an assignment’s GenAI elements are authentic to the field/career/etc. or why using GenAI would make the assignment inauthentic.

Wiggins, G. (1998). Educative assessment: designing assessments to inform and improve student performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 21 – 42.

Mueller, J. (2005). The authentic assessment toolbox: Enhancing student learning through online faculty development. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 1(1), 1-7.

“The Power of Authentic Assessment in the Age of AI” by Siham Al Amouse and Amal Farhat for Faculty Focus (2023, December 13).

Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Episode 337, “Authentic Assessments” with Deandra Little (2020, November 25)

Related pages from University of Michigan:

• “Creating authentic assessments” by Rachel Niemer from Online Teaching (2024, January 15)
• “Defining Assessment” from CRLT
• “Enhancing Learning Through Authentic Assessment” from LSA’s Learning & Teaching Technology Consultants

Related pages from other universities:

• “Authentic Assessment” from Indiana University’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
• “Authentic Assessment” from Western Michigan University
• “Authentic Assessments“ by Nicole Messier for University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence (2022).
• “Building Authentic Assessments” from University of Florida’s Center for Instructional Technology and Training
• “Designing Assignments for Learning” from Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning