Authenticity

Authenticity in education is the fidelity of the intellectual learning environment to the real-world ways in which knowledge is used in the field of study into which the student is being inducted. In other words, the learning that is engendered in formal education and the mechanisms through which such learning is judged are authentic to the extent that there is congruence between the institutionally derived tasks and reality. In reality, significant accomplishment requires the production, rather than the reproduction, of knowledge. Production of knowledge is a particular type of cognitive work that constructs new knowledge in a meaningful way and has a personal, utilitarian, or aesthetic value beyond the demonstration of competence. Therefore, formal learning tasks are authentic when they meet one or more of criteria for significant accomplishment. Within education, authenticity connotes the quality of intellectual engagement required in reading; writing; speaking; coping with challenges that do not have single solutions; and producing tangible artifacts such as a research report, a musical score, an exhibition of artwork, or a demonstration of an invention. There are three standards by which intellectual engagement can be judged authentic: 1.

1.
Analysis: The task requires higher-order thinking with content by organizing, synthesizing, interpreting, evaluating, and hypothesizing to produce comparisons, contrasts, arguments, new applications of information, and appraisals of competing perspectives.
2.
Disciplinary concepts: The task requires an understanding of ideas, concepts, theories, and principles that are central to the academic or professional disciplines into which the student is being inducted.
3.
Elaborated written communication: The task requires production of detail, qualification, argument, and conclusions that are clear, coherent, and rich.

This interpretation of authenticity is entirely consistent with contemporary theories of learning and knowing, which emphasize how knowledge is represented, organized, and processed in the mind. Because these theories imply that instruction and assessment should be integrated, authenticity can refer to both achievement (the correspondence between classroom instruction and reality) and assessment (the correspondence between instruction and assessment).

Educational practices often assert authenticity through using interactive video environments to engage students in simulated real-life problems. These have produced gains in problem solving,[Page 62] communication skills, and more positive attitudes to domain knowledge. However, it is not simulations per se but the extent to which they replicate the conditions in which people are challenged in context that determines authenticity. No matter how authentic a task seems, the institutional constraints and policy variables in formal education contexts mean that authenticity in education is an approximation that need not necessarily capture the totality or urgency of all the real-life variables. Currently, the lack of systematic investigation into the effects of the learning context, the learning task, and the learners' interpretations of context and task in the simulated experiences means that the validity and reliability of the simulations are not yet well understood.