Bridging Teacher Knowledge and Practice: Exploring Authentic Assessment across Educational Levels

Abstract

As teachers, we are living and working in times of abundant challenge and change. These challenges transpire across different education levels and sectors, including K–12, vocational, tertiary, and adult learning. Within this vast education ecosystem, a major challenge for all teachers is to allocate time, effort, and resources to ensure that their students receive a quality education with real-world implications, influencing soft-skill attainment, such as teamwork, communication, and critical thinking skills. In this article, the authors discuss, through a theoretical lens, the value of considering a national and universal approach to self- and peer-evaluations of authentic assessment tasks to improve teacher practice in Australia. Currently, there is modest opportunity amongst K–12 and tertiary teachers to comprehensively learn together, limiting cross-fertilisation of practice and interconnectedness, and as a national community of practice. The authors argue in this paper that offering an avenue to share knowledge and practice in authentic assessment design could potentially assist in addressing this challenge. Therefore, the article is dedicated to exploring the barriers and opportunities to advance a national and universal approach to transferable professional development in authentic assessment practice within the Australian education ecosystem.

Keywords

• authentic assessment
• Australian education system
• standardised testing
• assessment policy
• assessment practice