“Authentic” Assessments…

After reading UbD and the assessment article online, I am most interested to talk about authentic performance tasks.  While everything I have read so far this semester on assessment has stressed the importance of these “authentic” tasks which ask students to relate learned material back to real-world situations/applications, I cannot recall many wonderful authentic tasks in my past education (pre-college).  I am particularly interested in this topic because I often feel that schools do not do enough in the way of preparing students for the “real world.”  For example, I graduated high school, having taken math through AP calculus, yet don’t believe we were ever asked to apply math to situations we might encounter in our future (credit cards, loans, mortgages etc.)  While this might seem basic and obvious, I think it would benefit the majority of students to have practice and instruction in such realistic applications.  How many students get to college and start racking up bills on credit cards, not fully realizing the consequences of their spending and high APR’s?

I am also interested in authentic assessment because it seems like an aspect of assessment that may at first seem easy to incorporate or design, but upon closer examination, I believe true authentic assessment that shows deep understanding and application is more difficult to create.   I am thinking of assessments that may at first sound good and appealing, but do not really test much depth of knowledge and understanding.  This is similar to the example cited in ch. 8 of UbD, when the teacher is asked to self-assess her civil war task for validity.

In specifically thinking about the art classroom, I think authentic tasks would certainly be easier in some mediums than others.  I initially think about digital media and art and the myriad authentic tasks that could branch from that field, as it is can be closely related with design.  As I think about painting, printmaking, or ceramics, it becomes somewhat harder to think of authentic tasks that are directly related to how a student might apply these to real-world situations.  In terms of yielding data that you need, authentic tasks in the art class would still have to be accompanied by specific rubrics and clearly explained so that students know what is expected of them.

I am curious to hear other ideas about authentic tasks specifically in the context of the art class.  Do these types of tasks have equal importance here as in other subject matter, more, less?  Would creating and assigning authentic tasks take anything away from certain art lessons?