Both – traditional and authentic assessments are widely used in social studies grades 4th-8th. While both forms of assessment aim to give grades and may be used for ranking, the properties they test, as well as their aims, are rather different. Thus, traditional assessments focus on checking students’ knowledge as well as their ability to understand the material (Quansah, 2018). Authentic strategies, vise versa, aim to measure learners’ proficiency in social studies. They test how well students are able to synthetize and apply the material learned in different social contexts.
The benefit of traditional assessment lies in its rigid and fixed form since it allows to easily grade students based on standardized valid criteria. Authentic tests are more flexible and provide many ways of evaluations; however, the criteria of assessment may not be clearly defined (Udvari-Solner & Thousand, 2018). Traditional tests are taken on the basis of curriculum and, as a rule, follow certain topic learned. Authentic assessment, vice versa, largely defines the curriculum, since the teacher may extend or diminish time students need to complete a social project or other assessment based on their ability to achieve certain goals.
The typical traditional forms of assessment include different kinds of tests, such as standardized, achievement, multiple choice tests and some others. Authentic assessment, vice versa, can assume diverse formats, such as demonstrations, portfolios, social projects, presentations, simulations and experiments (Harper et al., 2021). All these variations aim to test the students’ ability to apply knowledge in situations that are maximally close to real life settings learners will encounter in their future work.
References
Quansah, F. (2018). Traditional or performance assessment: What is the right way to assessing learners. Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 8(1), 21-24. Web.
Udvari-Solner, A., & Thousand, J. (2018). Effective organisational instructional and curricular practices in inclusive schools and classrooms. In Towards inclusive schools? (pp. 147-163). Routledge.
Harper, R., Bretag, T., & Rundle, K. (2021). Detecting contract cheating: examining the role of assessment type. Higher Education Research & Development, 40(2), 263-278. Web.