Authentic assessment: Evaluating Reading and Writing Education

Authentic assessment can be referred to as assessment tasks that epitomise actual reading and writing in school and in the real world. The key aim of authentic assessment is to evaluate various kinds of literacy abilities in contexts similar to actual situations whereby the alleged abilities are employed. It also aims at assessing the abilities of students in real-world. In other words it is a form of assessment that requires students to apply their skills to authentic projects and tasks (Chapman & King, 2005; Roberts & Inman, 2007). For instance, authentic assessment may require students to read actual texts, write meaningful topics for real purposes and take part in authentic literacy tasks such as writing letters, keeping journals, editing pieces of writing until it becomes suitable for readers and discussing books (Wiggins, 1989; Pearson & Valencia, 1987). According to Aiken (1996), authentic assessment was developed due to criticism directed towards multiple-choice tests which in most cases provide superficial ideas of a student’s knowledge and understanding in a particular subject area and the application of the knowledge acquired by the students

A critical look at the developed authentic assessment strategy shows that this assessment strategy is reliable and valid mainly because it provides a genuine accountability of knowledge and understanding of students. These assessments can be represented numerically or put on a scale so as to make it possible to integrate individual results and meet federal and state requirements for equivalent quantitative data (National Center for Fair and Open Testing, 1992). For instance, the performance of students in the various tasks that they are required to complete, can be quan...

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...ts, with learning support teachers and with parents to help the students acquire proficiency and maintain the recording devices availed by the school.

Case 3: For students with difficulty in writing

a. Students with difficulty in writing due to health or other circumstances will be assessed in their explanation and prediction mainly through speech recording or verbal explanations. The mark weights will be adjusted to accord more marks for verbal explanation.

b. The assessment strategy will be modified by allowing them to record their explanations and predictions of the water cycle experiments and by noting their verbal responses when specifically asked.

c. This would require collaboration with learning support officers and year level coordinator to provide the recording equipment such as tape recorders and to record their observations for assessment.