A Summary on the Issues on the Development of Authentic Assessment
By: Agus Eko Cahyono and Jumariati

There is mismatch between measures of language competence and the actual communicative competence required in real world communicative interaction (Duran, 1988; Kitao & Kitao, 1996; McNamara, 1996; O'Malley and Valdez Pierce, 1996; Spolsky, 1995). The movement of authentic assessment is an attempt to achieve a more appropriate and valid representation of student communicative competencies than that derived from standardized objective tests. Authentic assessment is also named performance-based assessment (Meyer, 1992; Marzano, 1993; but Wiggins (1990) named it as alternative assessment. Authentic assessment is an assessment that simulates, as far as possible, the authentic behavior which learners will need to enact in real situations. Some examples of authentic assessment are self- and peer-assessment, projects or exhibitions, observations, journals, and portfolios.

Ideally authentic assessment should provide long-term student engagement with learning and can occur at any stage of the teaching program. It should utilize a variety of resources and perspectives over a sustained period of time, as well as peer collaborations to promote engaging and open conversation. Authentic assessment should be based on an environment that the student could work in, learn in or utilize post task and include the development of a scenario. This type of learning and teaching is preferable toward the end of a degree when students are comfortable collaborating and working on ill-defined problems, and have skills in reflection.
There are some benefits and challenges of authentic assessment. The benefits are first, it motivates students to engage in a deeper and more productive learning. Second, it challenges students to undertake complex higher order reasoning, and to think independently and creatively. Third, students can reflect on and assess their own work and effort. They can see meaningfully how effectively they apply conceptual learning. Finally, it enhances graduate employability by developing students' "work-readiness” capabilities. However, there are also some challenges in implementing authentic assessment. First, it increases the potential for things to go wrong and jeopardize a student's chance to demonstrate their achievements and capabilities. Second, it can place a significant burden on teachers for instance arranging each student's unique setting in advance, negotiating their individual tasks and interpreting and grading their work which can be very time-consuming. Third, developing appropriate simulations is resource intensive, although it can yield long-term returns.
Authentic assessments require teacher’s judgment. To help making the judgments accurate and reliable, a scoring scale (rubric) is used. The criteria for each performance level must be precisely defined in terms of what the student actually does to demonstrate skill or proficiency at that level. There are some ways to improve reliability of authentic assessment: (1) establish clear assessment criteria, (2) include process indicators in assessment criteria, as well as product indicators, (3) develop an assessment rubric outlining standards at different grade levels, (4) incorporate multiple sources of evidence of student achievement, and (5) when grading, involve others such as host supervisors and marking teams, and students themselves as self- or peer assessors.
 
References:
O’Malley, J.M. & Pierce, L.V. 1996. Authentic Assessment for English Language Learners: Practical Approaches for Teachers.  Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

Wiggins, G. 1990. The Case for Authentic Assessment. ERIC Clearinghouse on Tests
Measurement and Evaluation, Washington DC.