1. To what extent does the assessment activity challenge the student?

For assessment to be authentic, it needs to mirror real-world problems that are not solved by just reproducing things that students learned by heart, but by creating new(-to-the-student) solutions, including analysing the task in order to choose the relevant skills and knowledge to even approach the task with.

This clearly sounds great, but as an academic developer, my mind goes directly to how this is aligned with both learning outcomes and learning activities. My fear would be that it is easy to make the assessment way too challenging if the focus is on authentic assessment alone and students are not practising on very similar tasks before already.

2. Is a performance, or product, required as a final assessment outcome?

Real-world problems require actual solutions, often in form of a product that addresses a certain need. In an assessment context, we need to balance the ideal of a functional product that provides a solution to a problem with wanting to check whether specific skills have been acquired. I.e. what would happen if students found a solution that perfectly solved the problem they were tasked with, but did it in some other way without demonstrating the skills we had planned on assessing? Would that be ok, or do we need to provide boundary conditions that make it necessary or explicit that students are to use a specific skill in their solutions?

This facet of authentic assessment strongly implicates that assessment cannot happen only in a matter of hours in a written closed-book exam, but requires more time and likely different formats (even though many of my authentic products in my job actually are written pieces).

3. Does the assessment activity require that transfer of learning has occurred, by means of demonstration of skill?

Transfer is a highest level learning outcome in both Bloom’s and the SOLO taxonomy, and definitely something that students should learn — and we should assess — at some point. How far the transfer should be, i.e. if skills and knowledge really need to be applied in a completely different domain, or just on a different example, and where the boundary between those two is, is open for debate though. And we can transfer skills that we learned in class to different contexts, or we can bring skills that we learned elsewhere into the context we focussed on in class. But again we need to keep in mind that we should only be assessing things that students actually had the chance to learn in our courses (or, arguably, in required courses before).

4. Does the assessment activity require that metacognition is demonstrated?

It is obviously an important skill to acquire to self-assess and self-direct learning, and to put it into the bigger context of the real world and ones own goals. If assessment is to mirror the demands of real-world tasks after university, reflecting on ones own performance might be a useful thing to include. But this, again, is something that clearly needs to be practice and formative feedback before it can be used in assessment.