Feed Forward and Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessments demonstrate what students truly learn in class rather than the students’ abilities to get good grades on traditional tests and quizzes. Authentic assessments not only demonstrate learning, but provide learning as well. Educators can use these type of assessments to measure students’ performance and to see if the learning objectives were met. Authentic assessment promotes the learning process and assist students to gain knowledge while completing assignments that are helpful to get a real experience. Authentic assessments enable students show capability without the pressure of having an exam. I see this assessment tools as a great choice for students who suffer from test anxiety, or are not a good test-taker.

To improve students’ learning and enhance students’ performances in authentic assessment tasks or any other types of assessment tasks, the educator must provide timely, effective, specific feedback. Most of the times, feedback focuses on the past, rather than the future, and it is directed to what has already happened. Feed forward is feedback that is "forward looking"; it is a feedback that focus on the future. It allows educators and students to identify gaps in student learning, and help the students to fill in these gaps.  

Tips on using 'feed-forward' when setting assignments

As an educator, I would make sure that I use the appropriate type of assessments and provide feedback that is looking at what occurred in the past to change t in the future. There are many type of authentic tasks that can be used in the assessment of nursing students such as: discussion questions, wikis, blogs, and reflective journals. I would create methods to communicate feedback to help students get the benefit of the task as well as the feedback that identifies both the problem and the solution. There are many technological tools that I can use to provide audio or visual feedback. Voki is an example of a tool that I can use to provide audio feedback. Assessment tasks that I would like to use will help the nursing students to get a real-life experience and engage the students in their upcoming role as nurses.

Here is a webpage that includes learning activities that encourage students to use higher-order thinking skills, and help educators to use authentic assessment.

How can I use authentic assessment in my classroom?