⏤ 🟡 DRAFT – EARLY WORK IN PROGRESS 🟡 ⏤
Summary: Assessment should invite students to bring their full selves to their work — not just perform what they think their instructor wants.
Description: Too often, students experience assessment as performative: producing what they believe will earn a high grade, rather than expressing what they truly think, wonder, or know. This narrows engagement and distorts learning. GOAL reclaims assessment as an opportunity for authentic communication — where students explore real questions, solve meaningful problems, and speak in their own voices. Authenticity also means designing assessments that connect to students’ lives, communities, and emerging identities as scholars and creators. When students are trusted to make choices, reflect on their learning, and infuse their work with their own experience and values, assessment becomes more than evaluation — it becomes authentic expression.
Core Practices
- Offer assignment formats that allow for choice in topic, genre, or audience.
- Design assessments that ask real questions or address real-world contexts, not just textbook simulations.
- Include reflective components that allow students to connect the assignment to their values, prior knowledge, or future goals.
- Invite students to write or speak in their own voice — including personal narrative, creative expression, or multilingual work where appropriate.
Reflective Questions
- Do my assignments ask students to express their thinking — or simply reproduce mine?
- How do I invite students to bring their lived experience and linguistic/cultural identities into their work?
- Are students exploring meaningful questions — or just completing assigned tasks?
Lineage & Influences
- bell hooks (1994) reminds us that education should be a practice of freedom, not conformity; authenticity is a site of liberation.
- Asao Inoue (2019) urges us to decenter dominant language norms and recognize multiple literacies as equally valid expressions of knowledge.
- Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2018) affirms the importance of offering multiple means of action and expression — recognizing that there are many ways to show understanding.
- Authentic assessment is supported across disciplines, including Wiggins (1998) and more recent advocates in writing studies, ethnic studies, and community-engaged learning.
- Scholars in culturally responsive pedagogy and anti-racist assessment practices have long called for honoring students’ voices as central to equity and justice in education.