Shocking though it may seem, content development professionals (CDPs) value authenticity in test items. Unfortunately, there are many constraints on test development that prevent CDPs and other test developers from prioritizing authenticity as they might otherwise wish. For example, the simple fact of limited “seat time” (i.e., how long a test can be) can be an obstacle to including many aspects of authentic work on such assessments.
But authenticity actually plays out quite differently in different content areas. In all cases, authenticity can increase test taker engagement. In content areas, authenticity can help tests to get at the actual standards that both instruction and assessment are supposed to target.
A major problem for ELA test development is the use of commissioned work for reading passages. This can solve many problems, but it often creates a real authenticity problem. Passages written specifically for assessment lack an authentic purpose. For example, letters to the editor are not to real editors and from real concerned readers. Little commissioned stories — or supposed excerpts from longer works — do not generally have the same quality as those that are published by commercial publishers.
Because so much of ELA instruction — and even more of ELA assessment — is aimed at students’ skills at reading and understanding the kinds of texts that they may encounter in their lives, authenticity in ELA assessment often comes down to text selection. Authentic texts are simply critical to authenticity with ELA. Items that ask questions that readers might naturally have about those texts also contribute to authenticity.
Authenticity in science assessment is quite different. The kinds of writing about science that naturally exist in the world are rarely an appropriate grade level for large scale assessment, and may include many issues and topics that extend beyond any one grade level’s standards. Authentic writing about science is rarely appropriate for inclusion in large-scale standardized assessment.
Nonetheless, authenticity is prized in science assessment. It just takes a different form than in ELA. In science, authenticity comes in the nature of the phenomenon at the focus of the item or scenario set. When it feels like it comes from test takers’ own world and lives, the phenomenon contributes authenticity. When items ask the kinds of questions that a real person — or perhaps even a scientifically minded person — might have about the phenomenon, they contribute authenticity.
This is not to say that relevant topics do not contribute to authenticity in ELA assessments. Certainly they do. But even less relevant topics can feel authentic when an author breathes the life into them that we see in great writing. But in science assessment, it is the topic — the phenomenon — that primarily drives authenticity, rather than its presentation.