Steps to Design High-Quality Authentic Assessments

Designing authentic assessment is essential to anchor student learning. Authentic assessments provide opportunities for students to apply their learning and demonstrate proficiency in global competence. To develop authentic assessments, follow these steps:

• Step 1 – Look at the global, technical, academic, and 21st-century skills that you are planning to achieve through this project. Then think about products, performances, services, and exhibitions of work related to authentic problems and tasks in the world that students can create and share. These should be meaningful tasks that are natural products of the project, relatable to the students, applicable to their own lives, and connected to the global community.
• Step 2 – Identify formative and summative assessment and match these assessments to authentic audience levels, keeping in mind Ron Berger's Hierarchy of Audience.
• Step 3 – Develop criteria and measure performance by:
  • Determining Tasks – Decide what the performance task the student is performing should look like and how the student will prove their global, technical, academic, and 21st century skills.
  • Clearly Stating Criteria – Make sure the criteria are clearly stated, brief, observable, include a statement of behavior, and are written in a language that students understand.
  • Utilizing Resources – Review the resources below as a starting point:
    • Asia Society Global Leadership Performance Outcomes and Rubrics for global competence and 21st-century skills
    • PMIEF toolkit resources for project management skills
    • Buck Institute for Education for PBL rubric development
    • North Dakota Department of Education Career Ready Practice Assessments

Authentic Assessment Examples

• The California Adult Literacy Professional Development Project and the National Education Association provide several examples of authentic assessment tools and examples.
• Standard University has a site dedicated to student self-assessment and peer-assessment.

Want to start to become an authentic assessment guru? Start by taking Module 4: Assessing Global STEM Project-Based Learning, a short 15-minute online professional development module that is part of the Career Readiness in a Global Economy: STEM and CTE program.