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Beautiful session was lovely to see the new and different teaching and learning approach. beautiful questions, amazing answers. Looking forward for more collaborations.

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Resources for MYP and DP Design students

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Blog and resources for the teaching of design

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Empathy is the driving force behind a successful design thinking project. Understanding the needs of the user is the key to successful design.

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Center for Teaching and Learning | Wiley Education Services

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Assessment is a critical component of the online classroom. It provides students with an idea of their progress in a course, identifies individual strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately serves as the measure of whether students achieve the course's learning objectives. Although each of these characteristics serves a valuable instructional or pedagogical function, it's also important that assessments engage students and prepare them with the skills they'll need in future courses, practicums, and even their careers.

Assessment isn't just important from a student perspective. With the online marketplace becoming increasingly crowded, it's critical that institutions ensure they are offering the courses and experiences that students are looking for.

In their survey of more than 1,500 past, present, and prospective online college students, Magda and Aslanian (2018) found that 74% of online college students are pursuing their program for career-focused reasons, such as transitioning to a new career, updating the skills required for their current job, increasing wages, or meeting employers' requirements.

Because the majority of online students are career-focused, courses and degree programs must provide those ties to the real world for institutions to stand out in the online landscape. Given its importance to the online classroom, assessment can be a great starting point for integrating this type of relevance into your course.

Authentic assessment is the idea of using creative learning experiences to test students' skills and knowledge in realistic situations. Authentic assessment measures students' success in a way that's relevant to the skills required of them once they've finished your course or degree program. In this article, we'll discuss the benefits and challenges of this type of assessment and how you can incorporate authentic assessment in your online course.

What Is Authentic Assessment?

Before we dig too far into how to create an authentic assessment, let's look at what makes an assessment authentic. Wiggins (1998) identifies a few key criteria:

1. It's realistic.

2. It requires judgement and innovation.

3. It asks the student to "do" the subject.

4. It replicates or simulates the contexts in which adults are "tested" in the workplace, in civic life, and in personal life.

5. It assesses the student's ability to efficiently and effectively use a repertoire of knowledge and skill to negotiate a complex task.

6. It allows appropriate opportunities to rehearse, practice, consult resources, and get feedback on and refine performances and products.

Simply put, an authentic assessment is one that requires students to apply what they've learned in a new, complex circumstance or situation. Typically, this can take one of two forms: real-world assessments that require students to engage in actual situations in their field, or realistic assessments that are relevant in nature but have students engage in situations that mimic the real world (e.g., a case study).

Regardless of the type, authentic assessment is often coupled with opportunities for rehearsal and/or practice. Authentic assessments are often scaffolded throughout a course and allow the instructor to provide feedback that students can then implement in subsequent drafts. Unlike traditional assessments (such as essays and multiple-choice exams), authentic assessments ask students to engage in scenarios or practices that are complex, realistic, and sometimes messy.

Benefits of Authentic Assessment

Shank (2009) identifies a few key challenges of assessments in the online environment: expecting a bell curve, using the wrong type of assessment (performance assessments vs. test assessments), not creating valid (enough) assessments, and using poorly written multiple-choice tests. Although authentic assessment is unlikely to overcome all of these challenges, it offers a number of benefits in an online course.

Notably, authentic assessment breaks the traditional paradigm of multiple-choice or automatically scoring tests and quizzes, which can lead students to believe that learning means staying up all night and cramming to memorize terms or expected answers. Instead, authentic assessments tend to be more student centered, as they ask students to demonstrate their learning through hands-on activities. Rather than asking students to memorize and recall facts, authentic assessments ask students to actively participate in situations that require them to apply the principles they've learned about in the instructional material. Thus, learning isn't about recalling; it's about performing, which, ideally, will motivate students to engage in the course and succeed in their endeavors.

Drawbacks of Authentic Assessment

As beneficial as authentic assessments can be, they do present challenges as well. First and foremost, authentic assessments require more time for both students and instructors than traditional assessments. For students, authentic assessments typically take longer to complete than an average quiz or test. Because these types of assessments are task based, they might be scaffolded over a number of modules or some other period of time. In addition, students might be more accustomed to traditional assessment, meaning that despite the advantages we've discussed, they might need some time to adjust to this new method.

For instructors, time is also of concern. Developing an authentic assessment can be an intense experience that requires course writers to identify and/or research relevant tasks, ensure that those tasks are applicable to students in different areas, and align those tasks with learning objectives and instructional materials. Also, given that students in online courses tend to be in a variety of geographic locations, it can be difficult to build an authentic assessment that's relevant to everyone. This challenge can vary by discipline, but it's important for course writers to remember that their students can be from anywhere.

In addition, unlike many traditional assessments, grading an authentic assessment is largely subjective. Because these types of assessments typically address more complex levels of learning, grading will likely take much longer. Authentic assessments typically require detailed, personalized, and specific feedback, meaning that, as beneficial as they can be for students and your course, they will require additional time to design and implement.

Education
Create a classroom management plan and/or lesson plan for the student's subject matter and/or intended audience.

Nursing
Assess a mock patient's health and plan and implement that patient's care.

Business
Develop a business plan for a company in the student's location and desired field.

Computer Science

Troubleshoot faulty code or create a website or application.

Exercise Science
Record and analyze a mock client's diet and come up with a nutrition and/or exercise plan.

How to Develop an Authentic Assessment

Now that we've explored the benefits and drawbacks of authentic assessment and looked at a handful of examples, let's move on to the steps involved in designing one. The following steps, based on those developed by the University of Florida's Center for Instructional Technology and Training (2018), can help set you on your way toward developing an authentic assessment that addresses your learning objectives, enhances your course, and meets your students' needs.

Identify Learning Objectives

Your learning objectives are the cornerstone of your course; they communicate what students should be able to do and what skills they'll develop during the course. Thus, it goes without saying that developing an authentic assessment should begin with these objectives. By starting this process with an objective in mind, you ensure that the authentic assessment you're developing will align with the objective and any corresponding instructional material.

In most instances, you'll want to focus on a macro objective-that is, an objective that illustrates what students will be able to do by the conclusion of the course. In a traditional setting, a final exam might be the assessment for a macro objective.

When you look at your objectives, it's also important to keep relevance in mind. After all, one of the major benefits of an authentic assessment is how it allows students to engage in a relevant or new environment, so you'll want to make sure that your learning objectives lend themselves to that type of activity. If your learning objectives are already measurable and student centered, though, this shouldn't be a problem.

Define Relevant Tasks

After identifying the learning objective(s) you're looking to measure through your authentic assessment, you can then start defining what students will actually do. Given that the assessment should be, well, authentic, start by looking at what professionals in your field do on a daily basis and how those tasks might relate to your selected learning objective. Although your task doesn't ultimately have to relate to your field, it should require students to apply themselves in a relevant and new situation. Ultimately, the relevance of your assessment to students' lives and/or goals should be clear. In fact, it's helpful to state the relevance explicitly at the outset of the assessment.

If you're struggling to identify a relevant task, consider starting with the verb of your learning objective. Oftentimes, you'll find that you're able to define your task by looking at what the objective asks students to do. For instance, if the objective for a business course is that students will be able to analyze the local and global impact of organizational decisions, consider creating a fictional scenario in which students have to make organizational decisions for a business and analyze the impact of those decisions. Looking at your objective's verb also ensures that your assessment aligns with your learning objective, which is a pillar of effective course design.

Identify Essential Performance Criteria

If the previous step was to define what students will do to complete your authentic assessment, this step focuses on how you'll know whether they've done it well. After all, just because an authentic assessment doesn't look like a traditional assessment doesn't mean that the goal isn't the same. You still need to have an indication of how well students have performed and whether they've achieved mastery.

With this in mind, it's important for these performance criteria to align with the nature of your task. To return to our business example from earlier, you'd want to make sure that the way you measure students' performance is reflective of or similar to the expectations they would encounter in a business scenario. For example, you'd want to create performance criteria specific to how students should make the organizational decisions and how accurately and/or appropriately they analyze those decisions. Although students shouldn't be held to the same standards as professionals in the field (they're novices, after all), it's still possible to measure student success in a new and relevant way.

Develop a Rubric

Rubrics are a powerful tool for many assessment types, and they're an essential component of authentic assessment. After all, authentic assessments are fairly subjective, and rubrics help ensure instructors are grading fairly and consistently from assessment to assessment and student to student. With this in mind, once you've identified the task and essential performance criteria (that is, what students will do and what benchmarks exist to make sure students do it well), the next step is to develop a rubric.

You might be thinking that this seems pretty similar to that last step. Well, it is! When designing your rubric, you should use the performance criteria you've identified and come up with measurable levels for each. Once you've developed your rubric, consider presenting it to students before they begin the assessment. That way, they know what you expect of them and can more readily gauge their own performance.

For more information on rubrics, feel free to check out our article "The Benefits of Rubrics in Online Courses."

Conclusion

Authentic assessment has the outstanding ability to make a long-lasting impact on not only your course, but also the students enrolled in it. By providing students with an opportunity to test their skills in new and relevant situations, you'll prepare them for how they'll be assessed in their professional lives and show them the relevance of your course's content outside the classroom. With that in mind, here are some of the key takeaways from this article:

Authentic assessment refers to an assessment that requires students to apply what they've learned in a new circumstance or situation, typically one that mirrors what would be expected of them in that discipline or field.

When preparing an authentic assessment for your course, remember that this kind of assessment will likely take more time on both the students' and facilitator's parts.

Authentic assessments should always align with the course's learning objective(s).

When identifying a relevant task for your learning objective(s), consider starting with the objective's verb. In most cases, this will provide an idea of what actions students should be able to perform.

Essential performance criteria help frame what performance will look like. Without them, it's difficult to assess students' work on a fair and consistent basis. Fortunately, instructors can use these criteria to develop a rubric, which in turn helps them evaluate fairly and consistently.

References

Magda, A. J., & Aslanian, C. B. (2018). Online college students 2018: Comprehensive data on demands and preferences. Louisville, KY: The Learning House, Inc.

Shank, P. (2009, May). Four typical online learning assessment mistakes. In R. Kelly (Ed.), Assessing online learning: Strategies, challenges and opportunities (pp. 4-6). Madison, WI: Magna Publications Inc. Available from https://www.facultyfocus.com/free-reports/assessing-online-learning-strategies-challenges-and-opportunities/

University of Florida. (2018). Authentic assessment in online learning. Retrieved from http://citt.ufl.edu/online-teaching-resources/assessments/authentic-assessment-in-online-learning/

Wiggins, G. (1998). Education assessment: Designing assessments to inform and improve student performance. San Francisco: Joey-Bass Publishers.

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Authentic Assessment in the Online Classroom - Center for Teaching and Learning | Wiley Education Services

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Assessment is a critical component of the online classroom. It provides students with an idea of their progress in a course, identifies individual strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately serves as the measure of whether students achieve the course's learning objectives.

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GRASPS model for project based inquiries

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GRASPS model for project based inquiries

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What is GRASPS?

GRASPS is a model for demonstrating performance of understanding using authentic assessments. It is one of many performance of understanding models, but is ideally suited to the kind of project-based inquiries we do in design. GRASPS represent a framework for organizing, delivering, and assessing a project-based assessment. The assessment associated with the inquiry is structured around the following expectations and goals.

Goal: A definition of the problem or goal

Role: Define the role of the student

Audience: Identify the target audience

Situation: This is the context or scenario of the goal

Product: What is created and why it will be created

Standards: Rubrics or success criteria

Benefits of GRASPS

Over the years of organizing and implementing our units this way, we have noticed some benefits for students and teachers. Many of these observations are from the perspective of an MYP or DP classroom, but the underlying ideas would benefit any project-based learning experience.

From the teacher's perspective, we have noticed:

Develop authentic learning experiences: The overall GRASPS structure allows us to identify more authentic learning experiences that drive our units of inquiry.

Clearer presentation of the purpose and content of a project-based inquiry: Because of the way a GRASPS inquiry is framed, communication of the goals, content, and purpose of the inquiry is clearer. During planning it is easier for teachers to plan and develop more authentic units. This has become particularly important for collaboration between teachers, as most our units are planned to be taught by several people.

Clarify the roles, perspectives, and responsibilities of students: The GRASPS model clarifies these aspects of the inquiry. Teachers can choose resources, learning experiences, and content to support the students' development in these areas. In particular, the Role has become an important part of how we frame units to students (see below)

Communicate the expectations of the inquiry: The structure allows for clear communication of the rubric, assessment expectations, as well as the approaches to learning that students need to utilize to be successful. This has been particularly important in recent times when some of our teaching and learning has shifted to remote

Guide the selection of learning experiences, content and skills necessary for success: Through planning a unit around the GRASPS framework, teachers can think critically and creatively about the type of learning experiences that are needed to support the inquiry. We have started to look more broadly at the skills that re needed, with a particular focus on the Approaches to Learning (ATLs).

New understandings about GRASPS

Since employing GRASPS to guide our unit development, we have come to some understandings about aspects of the model that helping us strengthen the delivery of our units.

Role

In the past, we often defined the role of the student in a very brief way - almost like a job title. You will be a a designer, engineer, marketer, etc. However we found that this often relied on student's assumptions of what the role is. The role is very important as it defines the perspective from which the student approaches the task.

Now, we spend some time considering the role of the student in this inquiry, the skills they need, and how this role is closely connected to the Goal, Audience, and Product. For example, in a unit that defines the role as a design researcher, we spend time in class unpacking what this role entails, and how it connected to the goal, audience, and product. We discuss and highlight the skills, perspectives, and approaches that a person in this role might need to draw upon in order to be successful.

Some questions we ask in the planning stages to help us better identify and describe the role include:

What are some authentic roles that are related to the goal or discipline?

How will students understand the scope and expectations of the role?

What prior knowledge about the role will students have?

What skills and knowledge will students need to be successful in this role?

Is there a role model that students can refer to or meet in person?

Audience

The audience provides much context to the inquiry. To this end, the audience helps teachers identify, organize, and prioritize the content and skills that students need in order to meet the needs of the audience. This goes beyond just satisfying the immediate needs of the audience, but also includes understanding the audience from a user-centered design perspective and empathizing with their needs in order to develop a more successful design solution. We've started to use User-Task-Environment analysis as part of the research approach. In Design, this approach also supports our research goals, and helps students think more broadly about the problem.

Some guiding questions we ask include:

What is the relationship between the audience and the role?

What are the defining characteristics of the audience, and how might these influence the skills and knowledge needed by students to be successful?

Developing stronger GRASPS assessments

To support teachers I've created a guide to developing a GRASPS assessment and incorporating into MYP and DP units of inquiry.

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Revisiting GRASPS: a model for project based learning - Aidan Hammond

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A while ago we started using GRASPS models to develop our units in MYP and DP design. I wrote about our initial work with this model a few years ago.

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Example site,
MYP 5 Design,

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Flat design Designing for sustainability and society Grade 10 Product Design, Unit 2

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Our model for organizing and framing research for students

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At certain points in the inquiry cycle, we ask students to focus or make specific reference to these three aspects
A1: Explaining the need for a solution for a user
We ask students to present their analysis here using evidence from their A2 research, and highlighting elements of the task, user, and environment to frame the problem.
A2: Organizing primary and secondary research in the research plan
We ask students to organize their research to investigate into the three areas, using NoodleTools to organize their research.
A4: Developing a Design Brief
In the requirements of their design brief, students identify how each requirement is related to one or some of the aspects: task, user, or environment.
B1: Organizing design specifications, particularly those related user group and performance
Students use their research and design brief to develop design specifications. In this section, we ask students to consider how the specifications meet the needs of the user and help the designer accomplish their task.
D4: Evaluating the impact of the design.
When evaluating the impact of the design, students consider how it meets the needs of the user, performs the task, and works within the environment.

All of these questions and considerations are presented in a poster below:

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UCD Task-User-Environment analysis for Empathy in Design - Aidan Hammond

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At certain points in the inquiry cycle, we ask students to focus or make specific reference to these three aspects A1: Explaining the need for a solution for a user We ask students to present their analysis here using evidence from their A2 research, and highlighting elements of the task, user, and environment to frame the problem.

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Site that inspired us to develop designer sites

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Site that inspired us to develop designer sites

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Contact Us

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You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.

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Use the form on the right to contact us. You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.