Authentic Assessment in the Digital Age

When everything feels like a product online, process seems more important than ever

As we continue to experience an Internet-mediated life, our attention follows that river of information. News on our computers are replacing the daily print paper. Zoom chats have taken the place of meetings with colleagues and gatherings with friends and family. And none of these experiences happen in a vacuum. While online, we are bombarded with notifications and invitations to engage in everything the Internet has to offer. When do we have time to just think?

Many parents and educators were already worried about the amount of time kids spent online pre-pandemic. My wife and I tried to adhere to the “two hour limit” when our children were younger. Now, as in-person options remain limited, people dispense with physical reality and seek out opportunities to connect via computers.

With almost every opportunity, there is also a cost. Despite a consensus that we should relax regarding screen time limits during the pandemic, there are concerns about what our kids are engaging with online and how often they are engaging in it.

For instance, how do they search for and select information? Do our students approach a website, a social media post, or a journalist’s article with a critical stance? Are they able to step back and, while not assuming everything is worthy of suspicion, at least resist simple acceptance of what information is proposed as 100% accurate?

These questions have become more relevant today. They can live within our curriculum if we allow some space for thougtful inquiry.

Education should provide some structures for students to engage with these types of questions within real work. As an example, we can develop students’ abilities to self-assess their own online contributions through authentic projects like writing a new Wikipedia entry. Feedback would come from peers, from online editors, and (most importantly) from an internal sense of what quality and craftmanship resembles.

To achieve this requires more than an app and a device - we need the foresight of educators to recognize that time spent offline and with others is as important as anything produced online. Processes such as thinking routines and protocols need to be embedded more often in our instructional plans, to provide support for discussion and reflection as well as to point to these scheduled pauses and state, “We must take time in our busy lives to step back and evaluate what it is we are doing and why.”

I don’t like to make predictions. Yet one thing I believe will become more prominent in education because of the pandemic is process as assessment, such as capturing our thinking about a topic a group discussed and analyzing the language, or looking back on multiple artifacts of learning to consider ones’ strengths, questions and next steps.

We will remain at a distance from our students for some time yet. Past approaches to assessment that produced only a score or associated learning with a level seem relegated to a classroom-only environment. What’s next is what will be needed.

Thank you for your readership and support. Proceeds from new subscriptions in June and July will be donated to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (Note: next week, the book study begins on the blog so no new content here for five weeks; subscriptions will be paused.)