'Authentic' and investigative activities
‘Real’ tasks can motivate and stimulate students more than the same material in abstract form. Authentic tasks reflect what occurs in settings beyond the educational environment.
They need to be experienced as authentic by students, rather than having all of the aspects of a full professional problem. Tasks may need to be simplified if they would lead to students being swamped or overloaded with material and issues they are not ready to handle yet.
Undertaking authentic tasks
Authentic tasks often require students to identify a problem from the context and to address it in ways that a practitioner would.
When authentic environments are created within a course, 'real' assessment tasks can readily be produced. However, such tasks may be created without an entire simulated environment.
While authentic tasks may obviously be undertaken in an external practice setting, the emphasis here is on utilising them as a normal part of course activity within the university.
See an example from Pharmacy
Authentic presentation
The outcomes of tasks are represented in formats used in real practice settings, e.g. oral reports rather than written ones, presentations to community groups, products for a client, a 'pitch' for film production or to a public relations company, reports to managers, etc.
This gives students practice in re-organising their work to suit different kinds of production. The process enables students to see their own learning through the perspectives of others eg. clients, managers.
Projects and research-oriented investigations
This includes investigations with unknown outcomes, requiring the identification and formulation of a problem. It requires investigation planning and theoretical and/or empirical exploration which leads to an outcome justified by evidence. These tasks are not fully determined and students have to decide what is required and what would constitute successful completion.
While these typically occur at the end of a program, they can be used throughout as a means of having students integrate their knowledge and apply it. The challenge of a problem in a specific context provides a focus for how academic knowledge can be usefully deployed.
The topic or project details may be suggested by students (if a strategy for ensuring student buy-in is adopted) or by staff . They can range from a project-like activity within a module to an extended research activity consuming a major part of a student’s workload.
Projects also provide good links between teaching and research.
See Brew (2006)
Learning agreements
Students define goals, prepare a learning plan, establish how the outcomes will be judged and negotiate an agreement with their teacher before undertaking it. The plan can be for a small or large part of the course. Renegotiation occurs after discussion with an advisor. Negotiation of the first plan takes some time, but this rapidly decreases for subsequent plans. See Anderson, Boud and Sampson (1996) about learning contracts.
Learning agreements can be used to structure projects (as in projects and research oriented investigations - see above) or in their own right as ways of undertaking study. They ensure a joint understanding of a study plan and reassure students in advance that if they complete their plan they will successfully complete the course.
In work-based settings negotiation can be a three-way process with a workplace advisor also being involved.
