Authentic Assessment

One of the ways higher education can make skills and capability more visible is through authentic assessment.

Authentic assessment is often discussed in higher education, but it can mean different things in different contexts.

Personally I like Professor Phillip Dawsons explanation.

If you think your assessment is authentic because it’s a real task that a professional in your field would recognise as actual work, I’m here to say I agree with you.

At its core, authentic assessment focuses on tasks that connect learning with real or realistic forms of practice. Rather than simply recalling information, learners apply knowledge, judgement, communication, and problem-solving in ways that reflect how capability is used beyond the university context.

This can take many forms across higher education, including:

• problem-based learning
• work-integrated learning (WIL)
• studio and design-based learning
• clinical simulation
• industry projects
• capstone experiences
• interdisciplinary challenges
• portfolios and reflective practice

For example, learners might:

• analyse a complex case study
• design a solution to a workplace problem
• respond to a simulated clinical scenario
• create a professional presentation or portfolio
• work with industry or community partners
• reflect on leadership, decision-making, or practice

Through these experiences, learners are not only developing disciplinary knowledge. They are also building and applying skills across communication, teamwork, inquiry, adaptability, reflection, ethical judgement, and professional practice.

Importantly, these skills rarely develop in isolation. They often build cumulatively across different contexts and experiences. A learner may develop leadership through workplace supervision, communication through presentations, problem-solving through project work, and professional judgement through placements or simulations. Over time, these experiences contribute to broader capability and professional identity.

This aligns closely with growing conversations around employability, lifelong learning, and authentic assessment in higher education.

Researchers and practitioners such as Professor Phillip Dawson and Professor Kevin Ashford-Rowe have explored how assessment can move beyond knowledge reproduction toward more authentic demonstrations of learning and capability.

The impact on evidence

This shift is also changing how educators think about evidence. In academic settings, we often default to writing. In workplace settings, people are more often asked to do, explain, present, decide, and produce.

This does not mean lowering standards. Instead, it asks educators to think more carefully about what learners are actually being asked to demonstrate.

Equivalency is about cognitive effort and judgement, not word count. This creates opportunities for learners to demonstrate capability through:

• presentations
• portfolios
• simulations
• workplace artefacts
• interviews
• reflective responses
• applied projects

Reflection also plays an important role in making capability visible. An artefact may show what a learner produced, but reflection can help make judgement, reasoning, and decision-making more explicit. The artefact shows what someone did. The reflection shows how and why they did it.

However, even in highly applied learning environments, an important challenge remains. Learners may still:

• focus only on completing the assessment
• underestimate the skills they are developing
• struggle to connect learning across contexts
• find it difficult to articulate what they can actually do

Which brings us back to a central idea in this course. Skills and capability are often developing through authentic learning experiences and asessment, but they are not always visible.

Helping learners recognise, evidence, and articulate those skills is an increasingly important part of higher education practice.

Share your thoughts

• Where might authentic, applied, or problem-based learning already be happening in your context, even in small ways?
• How might those experiences already be developing skills and capability that could be made more visible to learners?