Book Title: Authentic Assessment at Leeds: A Workbook

Book Description

Authentic Assessment at Leeds: A Workbook is a practical resource for higher education staff involved in designing, reviewing or developing assessment.

The workbook uses authentic assessment as a framework for thinking about how assessment can be meaningful to students’ personal or professional goals, meaningful to the discipline and/or meaningful to society. It moves beyond the idea that authentic assessment is simply about employability or replicating workplace tasks, and instead encourages purposeful decisions about how students apply knowledge, exercise judgement, communicate with different audiences and engage with complex contexts.

The workbook can be used to design a new assessment, substantially redesign an existing one, or strengthen authentic elements already present in an assessment. Through practical guidance and design activities, it supports readers to make purposeful decisions about different elements of assessment design such as learning outcomes, role, audience, mode, format, inclusion, criteria, feedback, assessment load, referencing, submission, reflection, group work, student support, partnership and evaluation.

Inclusive design runs throughout the workbook, alongside consideration of programme-level assessment, generative AI, student workload, staff workload and the practicalities of implementation. Readers can work through the workbook from beginning to end or use individual chapters to address a particular assessment design question.

Developed in the context of experiential learning and authentic assessment work at the University of Leeds, the workbook is intended to support thoughtful, inclusive and sustainable assessment design across a wide range of disciplines and higher education contexts.