Authentic Assessment

To me, authentic assessment means that we as teachers must ensure that we are assessing students’ proficiencies based on specific objectives and goals that we have made our students aware of.  An assessment cannot be authentic if students did not know what they were working toward.  As long as students are aware of our expectations, we can assess them and use the results to form an accurate picture of both where the students are in their mastery of the skills and how effective our teaching of those skills was.