Authentic Assessment in Social Studies

A Guide to Keeping it Real

David Sherrin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429536700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This engaging book will show you how to move beyond tests and essay writing to implement authentic assessments in your middle or high school social studies classroom. Award-winning teacher David Sherrin explains the value of authentic assessments and offers practical ways to get started and dive deeper in your own practice. You'll be encouraged and inspired by the real-life stories of classroom successes and failures that illustrate the points throughout the book. The chapters cover a range of categories, including different types of written, creative, and civic action assessments. The book includes:

• planning charts and rubrics showing how to use, grade, and give feedback on assessments so they truly aid student learning and progress
• specific examples, useful tips, and ready-to-go instructions that you can use immediately with your class
• open-ended assessments encourage scaffolding or adaptation for individual or group work to fit your classroom needs

You will learn how to personalize instruction and provide students with avenues for creativity and the types of learning experiences they need to be prepared for a complex world.

Part 1

Authentic Assessment

1

Authentic Assessment Q&A

What Is Authentic Assessment?

Thoughtful decisions about assessment should lay at the heart of all teachers’ practices since assessment ought to drive many of our instructional choices. Much has been written about assessment over the past decades as many schools and educators have moved, thankfully, away from test-taking to an emphasis on writing. Writing, especially in the Humanities, forms the basis of authentic assessments – a concept that is the centerpiece of this book and my work as a teacher.

Before we dive into the idea of authentic assessment, it is worthwhile to consider the very nature of assessment itself. Why do we assess students? There are at least seven reasons why teachers commonly assess their students: (1) to stratify them (for college placement) and report cards; (2) to prepare students for standardized tests; (3) to determine what they know; (4) to determine what they can do; (5) to evaluate their growth; (6) for the teacher to evaluate his or her own practice; and (7) to determine student mastery while simultaneously providing an additional rich learning experience.

The stratification outlook often drives much teaching and assessment, leading to an emphasis on tests that can easily differentiate students according to traditional understandings of intelligence and ability. I do value content knowledge, and when we are interested in measuring what content students have learned in a unit, I actually believe that a well-crafted multiple-choice quiz that is geared toward evaluating what students specifically learned in a unit and certain thinking skills serves as a valuable targeted assessment. I use multiple-choice quizzes in almost all of my content-heavy units.

Nonetheless, this ought to be only a small part of teaching and assessment. My former colleague Emily Block, who is clearly brilliant because she fled Westchester for Madison, Wisconsin, pointed the following out to me:

If an assessment is a way for students to demonstrate competency or mastery of “x” – then consider all of the things “x” could represent: content knowledge, certainly, but also academic skills and habits of mind like empathy, perseverance, and civic engagement.

When we think of assessment in this manner, then it is clear that tests and formal writing cannot fully encompass all of what we care about when engaging in meaningful learning. In this vein, as Emily thoughtfully explains, “many of our learning goals demand an authentic assessment because there is no other way to effectively gauge student success.”

In many schools, including my own, educators think about and discuss “project-based learning” and “authentic assessment.” It is not always clear, however, what some of those terms even mean. Judith T.M. Gulikers, Theo J. Bastiaens, and Paul Kirschner wrote a 2004 article in Educational Technology Research and Development that sought to lay out the nature of authentic assessment. They argue that when students engage in authentic assessments they are practicing the type of tasks that mirror what happens in professional practice.¹

Fred Newmann and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have produced some of the best work on authentic assessment. A 2002 article called “Developing Authentic Instruction in the Social Studies” in the Journal of Research in Education describes Newmann’s framework as consisting of “student construction of knowledge through disciplined inquiry that has value beyond the classroom.”² According to the authors, we can see the authenticity in assessment tasks, instruction, and student performance.

Newmann’s Center for Authentic Intellectual Work composed a guide for the Iowa Department of Education in 2007 called “Authentic Instruction and Assessment.” Newmann and his fellow writers argued that “the usual work demanded in school is rarely considered meaningful, significant, or worthwhile” and in order to correct course, they analyzed what type of mastery was needed for successful adults who continue to work, in a variety of fields, with knowledge. As they maintain:

authentic intellectual work involves original application of knowledge and skills, rather than just routine use of facts and procedures. It also entails careful study of the details of a particular problem and results in a product or presentation that has meaning beyond success in school.³

Denise Pope, a professor of education at Stanford University, and her colleagues at Challenge Success, Maureen Brown and Sarah Miles, describe two threads of authentic assessment in their book Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids. One is the idea that it “must be an actual task done in the real world, such as painting a mural” in which the students have real audiences and they leave a mark on their communities. They explain that other educators, such as McTighe and Ferrara, argue that authentic assessment can instead be a simulation of tasks that take place in the real word; for example, in-class debates or writing newspaper articles.⁴

It is clearly the case that for decades social studies teachers have integrated some level of authentic assessment into their classrooms; almost any piece of writing is authentic to the discipline even if it is in a traditional essay format. However, it is my assertion that social studies teachers can and should do much more to increase the authenticity of our assessments both in terms of the various types of tasks we ask (or allow) students to do as well as the format and context in which they do them.

The term “authentic assessment” derives from the premise that most people in their careers, no matter what the field, do not take tests on a regular basis. Tests are artificial creations that exist almost solely in the classroom. Pope, Brown, and Miles provide a wonderful illustration of the absurdity of tests:

Imagine if, in the working world, your boss told you early in the week that you would have a test later that week. He couldn’t tell you exactly what would be on the test, but it would definitely be timed, and you would not be allowed to use any of the typical resources on which you were used to relying, such as your working notes, your colleagues, the Internet, and so on. He would be the sole designer and assessor of this test; there would be no ability to ask questions or retake the test, and your score would greatly impact your next pay bonus. Sounds crazy, right? But in schools, this scenario may take place multiple times per week, and the students are suffering because of it.⁵

In higher education and in the professional world, people produce real artifacts of far greater complexity than tests. They write, present, film, record, and create. Even in my graduate program in history, I never took a test. I wrote and I presented. As a teacher, I took a couple of exams for certification and the rest of my career has involved creating written artifacts (worksheets, PowerPoints, role-plays, mock trials, and lessons) and about five presentations a day. We know teaching is a challenging profession because no other job asks people to give five presentations a day to an audience that really doesn’t want to be there! Even my professional evaluations have been based on observations, conversations, and my portfolios. Thankfully, never on my capacity to keep my shirt tucked in. I hope.

The term “authentic” is useful as a barometer for valuable tasks. While I will continue to use the phrase “authentic assessment” throughout this book, given its wide acceptance in the field of education, I hope to expand our thinking around assessments to include the four main criteria of the acronym JADE: Joyful, Authentic, Dynamic, and Effective. When we connect students to tasks that are student-centered, interactive, fun, and real, then the end result is that we achieve that final criteria of effectiveness. Formal essay writing might be authentic, to some degree, but my claim is that poems, civic action, mock UN conferences, museum galleries, monument-building, and historical fiction are the types of assessments that truly shine like JADE.

Perhaps the educators whose work most closely aligns with my expanded notion of authentic assessment are Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine. Mehta is a professor of education at Harvard University and Sarah Fine runs a teacher preparation program in San Diego. Together, they authored the book In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School. The concept of Deep Learning looks at six core competencies: content mastery, effective communication, critical thinking & problem solving, collaboration, self-directed learning, and academic mindset.⁶ In their New York Times article “High School Doesn’t Have to be Boring,” Mehta and Fine argue that in schools boredom is rampant and “in lower-level courses, students were often largely disengaged; in honors courses, students scrambled for grades at the expense of intellectual curiosity.”

Not surprisingly, they found core academic courses to be intellectually stultifying whereas “powerful learning was happening most often at the periphery – in electives, clubs and extracurriculars … [the] lively, productive places where teachers and students engaged together in consequential work.” Deeper learning asks us to invert our notion of authentic education. We need to look at clubs as the model for learning since, “the truly powerful core classes echoed what we saw in extracurriculars. Rather than touring students through the textbook, teachers invited students to participate in the authentic work of the field.” Instead of rote memorization and formulaic learning, Mehta and Fine recommend that schools deepen their attachment to the outside world and that “high school students need to be granted much more agency, responsibility and choice.” Assessments need to be authentic, but they also must fight the boredom and apathy by bringing joy, meaning, and leadership into the experience.⁷

What Are Authentic Products or Tasks in the Field of Social Studies?

If we look at any terminus field for social studies: historian, teacher, sociologist, policy maker, lawyer, human rights activist, anthropologist, artist, or filmmaker – we can identify a plethora of authentic products those professionals create. Authentic assessment is about starting students down this path of engaging in a rich array of real-world tasks, about providing them with the opportunity to sense the joy and achievement of making something that is real, and about respecting their intelligence and capabilities enough to put that power in their hands.

The bulk of the literature and practice in authentic assessment revolves around writing. I care deeply about formal writing and have worked throughout my career to support students in their writing, and I devoted two chapters in this book to that process. Writing is the foundational authentic assessment in history and in the larger field of social studies. Most of the formal academic work in the discipline still appears to take place within the somewhat strict confines of the book, journal article, dissertation, and essay.

Writing, however, is by no means the sole format that academics, artists, and laypeople use to teach and communicate historical understanding. We know that for most of human history and, until recently, in most cultures oral communication was the predominant form of passing down history. Moreover, historians are increasingly searching out alternative means to reach larger audiences. We see esteemed historians like Trevor Getz and Laurent Dubois producing graphic histories. We see experts on the French Revolution like Lynne Hunt sharing her expertise in History Channel documentaries. We see the top academics in American history like Eric Foner on YouTube panel discussions. And we see respected historians like Joanne Freeman and Ed Ayers on podcasts like Backstory.

Perhaps the best illustration of the changing nature of how we communicate history is to consider how we have learned about the Founding Fathers. For centuries, historians cultivated our understanding of the founders through the traditional means: paintings, books, and journal articles. We know what Alexander Hamilton and George Washington look like from portraits composed by artists like John Trumbull and Gilbert Stuart. We may know of their policies through journal articles like a 1961 piece by Jim E. Davis entitled “Alexander Hamilton: His Politics and Policies.” In the later 20th century, a number of historians of the American Revolution began to skirt around this obsession with the founders and instead focus on the role of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and ordinary citizens. Some academic historians like Joseph Ellis continued to produce high-quality biographies of the founders, such as his Pulitzer Prize winning book Founding Brothers. Popular historians, such as David McCullough, have never lost their love for the founders, and his book John Adams was truly one of my favorites. The conversation changed, however, in 2005 when another popular historian, Ron Chernow, published his riveting biography Alexander Hamilton.

I should say, rather, that everything changed when Lin-Manuel Miranda read the 818 page book and transformed it into one of the most unique and powerful Broadway shows ever put on stage. I have not actually seen Hamilton, but from being alive and living in Brooklyn in 2015, I know enough to be certain that the use of hip-hop, brilliant lyrics, rapping cabinet duels, and a multi-racial cast all served to provide a new meaning to Hamilton’s legacy and to the entire American Revolution. Broadway shows, of course, meld artistic genres and include theater, dance, and song into their productions. With the play, Miranda entered the historical conversation about the Revolution, the historiography, and took it by storm. Now we have to consider: who has told the most important story of Alexander Hamilton to shape people’s historical memory, Jim E. Davis, Ron Chernow, or Lin-Manuel Miranda? Certainly, at least among wealthy socialites without the time or patience for Chernow’s masterpiece, the answer is pretty clear and it begins with “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore …”

This is not just the case with Hamilton. Fo...