Note: This post was originally written for a course taught in Fall 2019. I plan to follow up on the topic in a future post as my thinking about Authentic assessment has changed. However, I know some others picked up on this assignment type and developed it. So, I wanted to make it available again.
Authentic Assessment is a bit of a pedagogical buzzword. But, unlike many other such buzzwords, it actually has an important role to play in course design. Broadly speaking, authentic assessments are learning assessments that aim to be worthwhile, significant, and meaningful to the students on top of providing instructors a means of assigning grades. Authentic assessments are the sorts of things students can find greater value in doing than standard assessments.
In this post, I want to focus on a specific type of authentic assessment I am including in my Intro to Political Philosophy course this semester: The Application Essay. My hope is that others may find at least parts of this assignment design useful to their own course designs.
Below I provide a broad outline of the assignment before discussing how I introduced it to the students and then sharing the evaluation standards I will be using when reviewing the essays.
The Assignment Basics
In the structure of the course, the Application Essays function as the major content-learning assessment, as well as being an avenue of assessing student writing in general. There are a total of 4 Application Essay assignments, corresponding to each of the 4 major units.
The general guidance for students for these Application Essays is to take an idea (or some ideas) from the relevant literature and apply it to a contemporary social or political issue to draw a conclusion. The contemporary issue students pick is up to them, which is partly what facilitates the authenticity of this assignment. If there is some socio-political issue they are interested in, then having the opportunity to write about it for a class automatically makes that class assignment less about “getting a grade” and more generally worthwhile to them, since it encourages them to make progress on an issue they find independently interesting or meaningful.
I’ll detail the assignment a bit more below, but it is worth highlighting here that just the basic design already embraces a few of the key principles of significant learning:
Agency: This assignment encourages students to exercise their own agency by identifying a topic they wish to focus on. However, by limiting focus to the material from the relevant unit, it does not fall into the trap of providing “too much freedom” which can be paralyzing for some students and/or reduce the educational value of the assignment.
Higher-order Thinking: Although students will need to be able to summarize the course material they are incorporating into the essay, the main focus is on applying the material to analyze and evaluate some issue. Thus, in accord with Bloom’s taxonomy, it mostly involves higher-order thinking and not mere regurgitation.
Drawing Connections: By requiring students to apply the course material to something from outside of class this assignment encourages forming conceptual and disciplinary connections. This is especially true in my case since most of my students are taking various political science courses simultaneously and have personal interest in politics, which will generally provide the fodder for the application. Drawing connections between various courses and disciplines strengthens learning overall and helps students see their courses as generally valuable to them as a human being, and not just a student looking for a grade.
Introducing the Assignment
The way I went about introducing the assignment was also important for its authenticity. In preparation for Day 2 of the course I had students read Alexander Khan’s short piece in the National Review entitled “Jefferson, Adams, and the Hope of Liberal Education”. In class, I had students take 5 minutes to reflect on the reading, with an emphasis on its qualities as a piece of intellectual writing.
They identified various things they liked and (mostly) disliked about it, which facilitated a discussion about what makes for good intellectual writing. Here my aim was to get away from students viewing school papers as “school papers” with various idiosyncratic requirements that will never apply to any writing they are likely to do “in the real world”. Instead, we focused on the qualities that make for a good piece of writing out there in the world.
And the students flourished with this activity. They chided Khan for failing to sufficiently explain key concepts and for making controversial claims without sufficient support. They praised the fact that when they were finished reading the piece, they still had more to think about or go discover. They expressed disappointment that although they agreed the issue was an important one, and that Khan made the case for its importance, that he failed to really deliver any sort of satisfying proposal.
All this is to say that the students took it upon themselves to evaluate good and bad writing; they didn’t need me to tell them what counted as good or bad writing. They knew, they just needed someone to give them the opportunity to make it explicit.
I closed the introduction to the activity by noting that I had uploaded a number of other examples of the sort of essay I had in mind: essays that we can find all over online where authors tell us what we can learn about tariffs from Adam Smith, or how Plato predicted the rise of Boris Johnson. All of these essay examples I gave them were real pieces published online by people aiming to convince others of something by drawing on some past ideas in political philosophy.
This approach to introducing the assignment fit well with 2 general principles of pedagogical design:
Promote Self-Evaluation: By having students engage in the evaluation of a piece of written work, I facilitated them thinking explicitly about the standards of good and bad writing. This can help them become better self-assessors, which can improve the work they do in school but also help them develop the skills necessary to the real world, when they don’t have an instructor giving them assignment guidelines.
Real World Assessment: Authentic assessment, in general, aims to be “more real world” than standard assessments. In this case, by providing students actual examples from “the real world” and basically telling them they will be doing the same thing, this enhances the authenticity of the overall assignment.
The Assignment Standards
As a class we discussed what made the Khan piece an example of good or bad writing. This meant we, as a class, identified the relevant standards for assessing their Application Essays.
I, then, put these standards in the form of a variety of questions:
Is the main idea of the essay clear and worth discussing?
Does it take a controversial, but seemingly reasonable stand on an interesting issue?
Is it obvious, early on, what the conclusion/thesis of the essay is?
Does the essay make an important contribution to the relevant debate?
Is the essay accessible to a generally intelligent but previously uninformed reader?
Are all major concepts and theories clearly and accurately explained?
Are all discussions and explanations appropriately thorough without being excessively long?
Will the audience find the tone and level of formality appropriate, encouraging them to read and engage?
Is the argument presented easy to follow and persuasive?
Is the essay and argument thoughtfully structured to present the most compelling case for the conclusion/thesis?
Are all potentially contentious claims reasonably supported?
Are likely objections or counterarguments fairly considered and responded to?
In the past when I assigned argumentative writing, the standards were stated in terms of the sorts of things we normally look for in a student essay: is there a clearly stated thesis in the introduction? Does the student accurately explain the concept/theory, etc.? Does the essay have a logical structure?
Those sorts of concerns are still all present in the standards for the Application Essays, but they are framed in a more authentic way. Broadly, they are framed around trying to convince an interested reader of your position. Rather than telling students that they will “lose points” if they inaccurately explain Hobbes’s State of Nature, we say that in order to even have the chance of convincing an interested reader, you have to make sure they understand the theory you are applying. That is part of why Khan’s article failed: some of the students did not feel like they understood some of the concepts he was working with because he did not sufficiently explain them.
Moreover, by organizing the standards in this way rather than, for instance, a rubric, I can provide more authentic feedback. The sort of questions we find in these standards are precisely the sorts of standards that an editor might ask in deciding whether to publish an intellectual essay on (for instance) Aeon or The Atlantic. And I can basically go down the questions as a ‘checklist’ while also providing encouragement and suggestions where necessary.
The Revision Process
Another important contribution to the authenticity of this assignment is the revision process. I am going to evaluate student work based on the standards discussed above, but some of the students may fail to sufficiently meet all of those standards some of the time. But docking points and telling them to learn to to better next time is not really an authentic way of engaging and evaluating their writing.
Instead, if students do not meet a standard, I explain to them the revisions necessary and give them the opportunity to revise in light of the feedback. This approach is more generally realistic, but it also provides students an immediate opportunity to put my feedback into action. And much of the cognitive psychology work indicates that feedback is substantially more effective if it can be immediately used.
Moreover, when students revise, they complete a “Cover Letter” which summarizes the feedback they had to account for and discusses how they accounted for it. Just like a letter to reviewers we would write, this process encourages students to take seriously the concerns raised by a reader and genuinely reflect on how to handle them. Additionally, this is an opportunity for me to verify that students are hearing what I think I am saying: its feedback on my feedback, which is an absolutely essential element of good learning. Too often we are frustrated that our students “don’t learn” despite how many times we tell them something, but we rarely, if ever, check to make sure the student heard what we said.
The revision process is also a way of indicating to students that they should embrace the opportunity to write a good Application Essay, and that I want to help them write something they are genuinely proud of. Students who do not meet standards are strongly encouraged to revise while students who meet the standards can also revise in order to receive an “Advanced” evaluation. Thus there is something more than merely a “passing” grade some to aim for.
Looking Ahead
In the course so far we have discussed the general idea of the Application Essays and established realistic standards. How will this assignment really work out? I’ll have a better idea come the later part of September. But, in the meantime, I will ensure students have ample opportunity to practice the various skills that the Essays will evaluate. Thus, in class, there will be times when I ask students to summarize a particular idea from the course – this helps me know whether they are getting it, but also helps them practice concise and accurate summation. Also, I will give them opportunities to reflect on and discuss what insight a thinker may be able to provide on some contemporary issue, thus very directly encouraging the sort of thinking I am asking for in the Essays.
Additionally, when students bring their first essays into class, I will be having them work with them in a few ways aimed at enhancing their understanding of good writing and ability to self-assess. So, for instance, I will ask them to recast their essay as a “4-sentence paper” (They say… I say… one may object… I would respond…). This provides an opportunity for them to reflect on the structure of their essay and the strength of their argument while also improving their overall ability to comprehend complex texts (since they could apply this approach to others’ work as well). I may, as well, have them engage in peer review where they examine each others’s work in accord with the standards discussed above.
I am excited for how these Essays may turn out. And so are my students, who perked up particularly at the idea of considering contemporary socio-political issues and realizing that reading old dead people in this class may actually have a direct impact on their lives beyond merely “getting a grade”. Hopefully the results match the hype!