{"id":2325,"date":"2015-02-05T18:28:04","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T01:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/?p=2325"},"modified":"2015-02-13T17:38:40","modified_gmt":"2015-02-14T00:38:40","slug":"authentic-assessment-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/2015\/02\/05\/authentic-assessment-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Authentic assessment and philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In order to prepare for a meeting of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Community of Practice, I recently started reading a few articles on “authentic assessment.” I have considered this idea before (see short blog post here<\/a>), but I thought I’d write a bit more about just what authentic assessment is and how it might be implemented in philosophy.<\/p>\n

Authentic assessment–what<\/span><\/h2>\n

A brief overview of authentic assessment can be found in Svinicki (2004).<\/strong> According to Svinicki, authentic assessment “is based on student activities that replicate real world performances as closely as possible” (23). She also lists several criteria for assessments to be authentic, from Wiggins (1998):<\/p>\n

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\u00a01. The assessment is realistic; it reflects the way the information or skills would be used in the \u201creal world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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2. The assessment requires judgment and innovation; it is based on solving unstructured problems that could easily have more than one right answer and, as such, requires the learner to make informed choices.<\/p>\n

3. The assessment asks the student to \u201cdo\u201d the subject, that is, to go through the procedures that are typical to the discipline under study.<\/p>\n

4. The assessment is done in situations as similar to the contexts in which the related skills are performed as possible.<\/p>\n

5. The assessment requires the student to demonstrate a wide range of skills that are related to the complex problem, including some that involve judgment.<\/p>\n

6. The assessment allows for feedback, practice, and second chances to solve the problem being addressed. (23-24)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She points to an example of how one might assign a paper as an authentic assessment. Rather than just writing an essay about law generally (perhaps legal theory?), one might ask students to write an essay arguing for why a particular law should be changed. Or even better, write a letter to legislators with that argument (25).<\/p>\n

Turns out there are numerous lists of what criteria should be used for authentic assessment, though (not surprising?). I have only looked at a few articles, and only those that are available for easy reading online (i.e., not books, or articles in books, or articles in journals to which our library does not have a digital subscription–I know this is lazy, but I’m not doing a major lit review here!). Here’s what I’ve found.<\/p>\n

In Ashford-Rowe et al. (2014)<\/strong>, eight questions are given that are said to get to the essential aspects of authentic assessment. These were first developed from a literature review on authentic assessment, then subjected to evaluation and discussion by several experts in educational design and assessment, and then used to redesign a module for a course upon which they gathered student and instructor feedback to determine whether the redesign solved some of the problems faced in the earlier design.<\/p>\n

(1) To what extent does the assessment activity challenge the student?<\/p>\n

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(2) \u00a0Is a performance, or product, required as a final assessment outcome?<\/p>\n

(3) \u00a0Does the assessment activity require that transfer of learning has occurred, by means of demonstration of skill?<\/p>\n

(4) \u00a0Does the assessment activity require that metacognition is demonstrated?<\/p>\n

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(5) \u00a0Does the assessment require a product or performance that could be recognised as authentic by a client or stakeholder? (accuracy)<\/p>\n

(6) \u00a0Is fidelity required in the assessment environment? And the assessment tools (actual or simulated)?<\/p>\n

(7) \u00a0Does the assessment activity require discussion and feedback?<\/p>\n

(8) \u00a0Does the assessment activity require that students collaborate? (219-220)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Regarding number 3, transfer of learning, the authors state: “The authentic assessment activity should support the notion that knowledge and skills learnt in one area can be applied within other, often unrelated, areas” (208). I think the idea here is that the knowledge and skills being assessed should be ones that can transfer to environments beyond the academic setting, which is the whole idea with authentic assessment I think.<\/p>\n

Number 4, metacognition, has to do with self-assessment, monitoring one’s own progress, the quality of one’s work, reflecting on the what one is doing and how it is useful beyond the classroom, etc.<\/p>\n

Number 6, regarding fidelity, has to do with the degree to which the environment in which the assessment takes place, and the tools used, are similar to what will be used and how, outside of the academic setting.<\/p>\n

The point of number 8, collaboration, is that, as the authors state, “The ability to collaborate is indispensable in most work environments” (210). So having assessments that involve collaboration would be important to their authenticity for many work environments. [Though not all, perhaps. And not all authentic assessment needs to be tied to the workplace, right? Couldn’t it be that students are developing skills and attitudes that they can use in other aspects of their lives outside of an educational context?]<\/p>\n

Gulikers et al. (2004)<\/strong> define authentic assessment as “an assessment requiring students to use the same competencies, or combinations of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, that they need to apply in the criterion situation in professional life” (69). They took a somewhat different approach to determining the nature of authentic assessments\u00a0than that reflected in the two lists above. They, too, started with a literature review, but from that focused on five dimensions of authentic assessments, each of which can vary in their authenticity:<\/p>\n

(a) the assessment task<\/p>\n

(b) the physical context<\/p>\n

(c) the social context<\/p>\n

(d) the assessment result or form<\/p>\n

(e) the assessment criteria (70)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Whereas the above two lists look at the kinds of qualities an assessment should have to count as “authentic,” this list looks at several dimensions of assessments and then considers what sorts of qualities in each dimension<\/em> would make an assessment more or less authentic.<\/p>\n

So, for example, an authentic task would be, given their definition of authentic assessment as connected to professional practice, one that students would face in their professional lives. Specifically, they define an authentic task as one that “resembles the criterion task with respect to the integration of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, its complexity, and its ownership” (71), where ownership has to do with who develops the problem and solution, the employee or the employer (I think that’s their point).<\/p>\n

The physical context has to do with what sorts of physical objects people will be working on, and also the tools they will generally be using. It makes assessments less authentic if we deprive students of tools in academic settings that they will be allowed to use in professional settings, or give them tools in academic settings that they generally won’t have access to in professional settings. Time constraints for completing the task are also relevant here, for if professionals have days to complete a task, asking students to do it in hours is less authentic.<\/p>\n

The social context has to do with how one would be working with others (or not) in the professional setting. Specifically, they specify that if the task in the professional setting would involve collaboration, then the assessment should do so, but not otherwise.<\/p>\n

The assessment result or form has to do with the product created through the task. It should be something that students could be asked to do in their professional lives, something that “permits making valid inferences about the underlying competencies,” which may require more than one task, with a variety of “indicators of learning” (75).<\/p>\n

Finally, the criteria for the assessment should be similar to those used in a professional setting and connected to professional competencies.<\/p>\n

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Authentic assessment and philosophy<\/span><\/h2>\n

Though Gulikers et al. (2004) tie authentic assessment pretty closely to professional life, and thus what they say might seem to be most relevant to disciplines where professional practice is directly part of courses (such as medicine, business, architecture, clinical psychology, and more), the overview in Svinicki (2004) suggests that authentic assessments could take place in a wide variety of disciplines. What could it look like in philosophy?<\/p>\n

I think this is a somewhat tricky question, because unlike some other fields, where what one studies is quite directly related to a particular kind of activity one might engage in after receiving a degree, philosophy is a field in which we practice skills and develop attitudes that can be used in a wide variety of activities, both within and beyond one’s professional life. What are those skills and attitudes? Well, that’s a whole different issue that could take months to determine (and we’re working on some of that by developing program outcomes for our major in philosophy here at UBC), but for now let’s just stick with the easy, but overly vague answers like: the ability to reason clearly; to analyze problems into their component parts and see interrelationships between these; to consider implications of particular beliefs or actions; to make a strong case for one approach to a problem over another; to identify assumptions lying behind various beliefs, approaches, practices; to locate the fundamental disagreements between two or more “sides” to a debate and thereby possibly find a way forward; to communicate clearly, orally and in writing; to take a charitable attitude towards opponents and focus on their arguments rather than the persons involved; and more.<\/p>\n

So what could it mean to do a task in philosophy in a similar way, with similar tools, for example, as what one might encounter in a work environment? Because the skills and attitudes developed in philosophy might be used in many different work environments, which one do we pick? Or, even more broadly, since many of these skills and attitudes can be practiced in everyday life, why restrict ourselves to what one might do in a work environment?<\/p>\n

Perhaps, though, this means we have a lot more leeway, which could be a good thing. Maybe authentic assessments in philosophy could be anything that connects to what one might do with philosophical thinking, speaking and writing skills outside of the educational setting. And if several courses included them during a students’ educational career, they could perhaps see how philosophy can be valuable in many<\/em> aspects of their lives, having done different sorts of authentic assessments applying those skills to different kinds of activities.<\/p>\n

When I came up with a couple of possible authentic assessments in philosophy courses last summer<\/a>, I believe I was thinking along these lines–something that the students would do that would mirror an activity they might engage in outside of class. One, which I implemented this year in my moral theory course, asked students to apply the moral theories we’re studying to a moral dilemma or issue of some kind. This isn’t exactly like an authentic assessment, though, because I’m not sure that I would expect anyone in their everyday lives to read Kant and Mill and then try to apply them to moral dilemmas they face. Maybe some people do, but I’m not really sure that’s the main value of normative moral theories (I’m still working on what I think that value is, exactly).<\/p>\n

Another one of the suggested assignments from that earlier blog post was that students would reflect on how they use philosophical thinking or speaking or writing in their lives outside of the course. That one isn’t asking them to do so<\/em>, though, so it’s not like mirroring a task they might use outside the class; it’s just asking them to reflect on how they already<\/em> do so.<\/p>\n

So I think I need to consider further just what an authentic assessment in philosophy might look like (the one from Svinicki (2004), above, about writing a letter to legislators to change a law is a good candidate), and how I might include one in a course I teach in the future. Possible ideas off the top of my head:<\/p>\n