Assessment: Authentic Performance Task

Rubric Measure

Score (0 or 1)

Comments

Authenticity
Representativeness
How well does the assessment
measures knowledge important
to the practice of the subject
Meaningfulness
How worthwhile is the task or
assessment is as part of the
learning process?
Cognitive Complexity
Does the assessment require higherorder thinking skills?

Content Coverage
Is the material adequately
addressed by the assessment?

Transparency
Is the task being assessed clear to
both the student and the teacher?

Fairness
Is the assessment unbiased towards
all students?

The authentic performance task requires students to actively

practice and implement the material they learned in the unit in
order to solve a problem. It is as representative as possible
without having students go work in the field in the subject.
For this form of assessment, the assessment is the learning
process. Students actively learned and synthesized new
information while completing the performance task. The
assessment required that they acquire new knowledge and use
existing knowledge in order to successfully complete the task. If
I could give it higher than a 1, I would.
The assessment requires students to exercise advanced analytical
and problem solving skills in addition to basic recall. Students
have to be able to use creativity and ingenuity to successfully
complete the assignment..
Students were required to include explanations using principles
of physics as to why they made certain design choices in their
process. It is definitely possible to make the assignment even
more analytical by requiring students to include calculations
besides measurements, however even without the math, the key
ideas and terms were included throughout the assessment.
The students knew exactly what they were required to do. They
complained because they felt the selection of materials wasnt
fair, but I reminded them they werent graded on the final result
of the drop, but on the process (which was material
independent).
The assessment was designed to be unbiased in that everyone
was assessed on those things they had control over. Students
were graded on participation and on their use of physical
principals in guiding their design, not on project outcome.

Assessment: Authentic Performance Task

Generalizability
Comparability
Does the assessment offer the same
conditions to all students?

Reproducibility
Is the assessment accurate and
consistent (do students perform
similarly on the assessment as on
previous ones or in line with their
previously demonstrated capacity)?

Transferability
Is the assessment relevant to future
tasks the student might be required
to perform?

Educational consequences
Does the assessment have a
positive, negative, or neutral impact
on learning and instruction?

Final Score

The students all had access to the same initial materials, they all
had the same amount of time to work on their projects (only in
class), and the drop was done on the same day, by the same
person in one class period.
The biggest surprise was how engaged students who normally do
poorly on assessments were. In terms of measuring conceptual
understanding, student performance was on track (students with
higher levels of understanding could better articulate key design
choices, while students with lower levels could not explain why
they intuitively knew a design would work). However because
grading was not based on result but based in part on
participation, even students who normally do poorly did quite
well.
As the assessment was essentially solving an engineering
problem with the design-build process, students who are
interested in this field might be doing this exact same thing again
in the future. For others, learning to plan, build a model that you
test, then revise and then reflect on again is an important process
that appears in many fields, including literature, journalism,
entertainment, science, engineering, economics, etc.
The assessment had a significantly positive impact both on
learning and on instruction. Students were more engaged and
motivated to learn the content so they could apply it to their
project. It provided a context and framing element to instruction
so I had a rationale for students as to why something was
necessary for them to learn.
Likely the best type of assessment, for conceptual understanding
and otherwise.