Impacts of authentic assessment on the development of graduate attributes

Authentic assessment activities are those that afford learners opportunities to practice finding solutions to real-world issues and challenges, so that upon graduation they are able to apply these skills to issues and challenges they will face in their workplaces. When learners are able to do this successfully, they are judged as job ready. However, ascertaining the impacts of authentic assessment activities upon the achievement of learning outcomes and the development of desirable graduate attributes is challenging. How can we know for certain that our assessment activities have had the desired impact? A possible pathway is to examine the impacts of authentic assessment activities on the development of graduate attributes. The study reported in this paper offers insights on how, and in which ways, the design of authentic assessment activities in an online professional development program for practitioners influenced the development of generic graduate attributes.