In search of an effective model for assessing learning in bilingual education: the authentic assessment

Abstract

We have a commitment to provide the most efficient, transparent and coherent evaluation procedures for bilingual education. In this articlethe authors offer all teachers of bilingual education a theoretical as well as practical approach to the so-called authentic assessment. Our aimisto provehow this method can be usedas an alternative to the traditional methods of evaluating the learning-outcomes of linguistic content by the students in our bilingual sections. This alternative requires a substantial change of focus for the teaching-learning process, since evaluating is not equivalent to examining when it comes to quantify results, but rather valuing the capacity of the student to solve competently the problems they meet in real life.Our proposal is meant to be applied in the classroom environment, thus the second part of our work applies authentic assessmentto a 4th grade Social Science didactic unit in a bilingual secondary school in Spain, (4° ESO). This practical example may be used as a pattern for new experiences through which teachers can personalize their evaluation strategies and achieve a more authentic assessment of students' learning.