Thanks very much for posting – and good luck with your studies and 2009!

When I talk about authentic assessment with educators I do it with a real world perspective. Much of what we do as educators is defined by time limitations, resource limitations etc – and therefore ‘unauthentic’ assessments still have their place. For instance, I’m a big fan of short quizzes at the beginnings of classes that had reading assigned. It helps get everyone focused, makes the reading ‘worth’ something in the students’ eyes, and is very easy for me to grade. I also like having lots of grades for students, so I can have a much more granular view of their achievement. Dr. Scott Warnock has an excellent blog entry on quizzing here: http://onlinewritingteacher.blogspot.com/search?q=quiz

So a quiz is about as ’school’ as you can get – no grounding in the real world. But our students know and understand the conventions of education, and quizzes are part of the game. I argue that well-designed authentic assessments can be a huge motivator and a break for everyone. They can fuel many days of more traditional school…

I’m not sure what you meant by ‘extreme’ people – perhaps you were wondering how to best assign students, or how to motivate them and manage their work to get the best out of them. If so, I’m always searching for ways to incentivize students to be constructive members of the community – to work hard at peer review. Perhaps if you clarify what you mean we can continue the conversation.

Authentic assessment is, at least, a better way of handling the diversity of students in the classroom. I would like to ask some questions, Are there sometimes when authentic assessment is not effective in the classroom? What would be some reasons?…

I notice that most of what you wrote deals with the peers. I do agree with it about learning through peers, how could we mixed a group of students where it is composed of not so extreme and not so not extreme people?…

I would really appreciate for your responses as soon as possible. I’m on my 3rd year of teacher education right now and it would be a great help for me in the future…

Thanks for it in advance. Happy new year…=-)

Truly,
Irma