Authenticity is in the eye of the beholder: student and teacher perceptions of assessment authenticity

Abstract

In vocational education and training (VET) in the Netherlands, learning and working are integrated from the start. Authentic assessments are used during competence‐based VET curricula to achieve correspondence between learning and working. The premise behind this study is that authenticity is subjective and that perceptions of assessment authenticity influence student learning for the assessments. It examines whether students and teachers differ in their perceptions of the authenticity of various assessment characteristics. Subsequently this study investigates whether freshman and senior students, who differ in their amount of practical experience, differ in their perceptions of assessment authenticity. The main findings were that teachers rated most assessment characteristics as more authentic than students did, while freshman and senior students did not differ in their perception of authenticity. Implications deal with communicating about and developing authentic assessment in the eyes of both students and teachers to stimulate students’ professional skills development during a VET curriculum

Keywords:

• authentic assessment
• curriculum
• student perception
• teacher perception
• teacher professionalisation
• vocational education and training

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Frans Bleumer, Lisan van Beurden, Marja van der Broek and the students and teachers from the Baronie College in Breda for making this study possible.