Authentic Learning
What is it?
Authentic learning is an approach that seeks to provide learners with opportunities to engage in real-world activities and assessment tasks that help to promote higher-order skills and competencies in preparation for real-world practice.
The separation of situation (context) and cognition leads to knowledge that is abstract and lacking in real-world utility. The theory of situated learning addresses this problem and argues that any analysis of learning must include the context in which learning takes place. Authentic learning is a learning design approach that extends this idea to the development of learning activities and assessment tasks that provide learners with opportunities to engage in activities that reflect real-world contexts. According to Herrington et. al (2013), authentic learning environments include the following components:
- Authentic contexts that reflect how knowledge will be used in practical contexts
- Authentic tasks
- Access to expert performances and modelling of expert processes
- Collaborative construction of knowledge
- Reflection
- Coaching and scaffolding
- Authentic assessment
Why use it?
Your students will encounter complex problems in their working lives and an authentic learning approach can help to promote the skills and knowledge that can be applied to real-world and highly complex contexts.
How do I do it?
There is no one recipe for the design of authentic learning approaches but the design components outlined above will help you make a start. Consider a ‘building block’ approach to the design of your authentic learning environment.
Authentic contexts that reflect how knowledge will be used in practical contexts
- Consider providing students with real-world scenarios to frame the learning experience. See authentic contexts for more details.
Authentic tasks
- Provide students with opportunities to engage in tasks that reflect real-world complexity. Encourage the application of skills and knowledge that they have developed in your unit to the learning activity or assessment task. See authentic tasks for more details.
Access to expert performances and modelling of expert processes
- Consider using video resources that are easily accessible and design individual or collaborative activities to encourage students to critically reflect on the material. See modelling for more details.
Collaborative construction of knowledge
- Collaboration is an essential component of problem-solving in real-world contexts. There are various tools that are available in vUWS and elsewhere to promote collaborative learning. See group work for more details on how to implement this stage.
Reflection
- Reflection is an important component of the pedagogy of authentic learning (Herrington, Parker, & Boase-Jelinek, 2014). There are tools in vUWS to promote student reflection. See the learning journals activity for more details on this.
Coaching and scaffolding
- Authentic learning tasks or problems are often unstructured and students might require scaffolding to help them address assessment tasks and activities. There are tools available in vUWS and elsewhere to provide students with structured guidance for a task. See the scaffolding (metacognitive and conceptual) activity for more details on this.
Authentic assessment
- This refers to the nature of the assessment task rather than the medium through which a task might be accomplished. Authentic assessments can be summative or formative. Consider the various tools available in vUWS to assess your students. For details see authentic assessment .
References
Herrington, J., Reeves, T., & Oliver, R. (2013). Authentic Learning Environments Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (pp. 401-412). New York: Springer.
