Merriam- Webster’s word of the year is authentic. What does authentic mean to you? Where are you using it in your professional conversations? In the past few months I have been asked to define authentic in a number of education contexts. First up, what makes a text authentic? One way to define authentic text is real-world written material that reflects the culture and societal context in which it was created. By using text sets made up of authentic texts, we can build student knowledge by first giving them the opportunity to read texts with explicit background information, and words that are used and defined within the context of the text. These first texts in a text set are like keys that will then unlock doors into more complex texts and learning opportunities that are also included in the text set. Authentic informational texts bring voice and perspective to classrooms, while authentic literature can provide windows into the culture of a period of time. Creating text sets puts historical events into a context rather than a series of isolated dates and people. And, authentic text sets help students to make connections between what they are learning and their own lived experiences and interests.
Next conversation, authentic math. How do you provide opportunities for students to work toward far transfer, and take the instructional leap from textbook math to choosing how to approach a real world problem through math? Samantha Fales, a math educator with Nordonia Schools, shared her response to this question at the OCTM state conference. She has developed a relationship with a local Tool and Die manufacturer, which led to identifying multiple industrial applications that build on the kind of mathematical thinking that students develop in a HS geometry class. Samantha then took those applications and back -mapped them to her class, creating sets of authentic math tasks based on the Tool and Die jobsite.
My most recent conversation, are traditional points based grades an authentic measure of student learning? No. They aren’t. In fact, points are arbitrary and may be based on multiple factors including effort, participation, extra-credit, and timeliness- along with meeting a set of criteria that is equated to a demonstrated level of mastery. More authentic measures include standards based grading, that uses consistent, mutually developed, performance descriptors. Even more authentic, the use of student self-assessment. Again, with access to performance descriptors and sets of exemplar work. Well designed performance tasks that are paired with assessment tasks give students the opportunity to build knowledge and skills through an intentional set of learning tasks, then demonstrate mastery through an authentic, novel assessment task. This was the model that was developed through the Ohio Performance Assessment Pilot (OPAP) project. Karin Hess has done a lot of work building out resources for creating and implementing high quality performance tasks. The link to her resources is below.
The current conversation that I am having is around how we will reframe our definition of authentic in the age of Generative AI. President Biden’s executive order on Artificial Intelligence includes a section on how to watermark or identify images, voices, music, and texts that have been generated by various AI tools, to distinguish them from the “real thing”. This is in response to concerns around intellectual and creative property, deep fake audio and vido recordings, and how to interpret copyright through the lens of AI. Yet, at the same time, we are also starting to shift how we think about “real things”. The two articles below from The Conversation, a news site featuring articles written by university researchers, reflects this current discussion. As an advocate for the use of Generative AI in the education space, I see this as an opportunity for a “Both And” discussion. What are the upsides of human autonomy? What are the upsides of augmented human/Generative AI work? What are the downsides of each side of this discussion? How will we know when one side or the other is out of balance? What can we do to maximize the upsides of both sides? What can we do to minimize the downsides?
Resources To Spark Your Thinking
Merriam-Webster Word Of The Year Definitely Wasn’t Picked By AI - NPR story
Generative AI Is Forcing People To Rethink What It Means To Be Authentic - The Convsersation
OPAP Science Tasks (2015)
Karin Hess’s Performance Task resources https://www.karin-hess.com/applying-rigor-to-pbl-cbe
- This tool created by Dr. Bryan Drost and the RDL Network includes links to Ohio Performance Level Descriptors. While these were designed to inform assessment development and scoring performance levels, they are also useful in building an understanding of what the continuum of mastery within a grade level set of standards can look like.