Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview.
By Marilyn M. Lombardi; Edited by Diana G. Oblinger
ELI Paper 1: 2007


In the previous post, I mentioned that due to the design of the authentic learning activity in the paper I was tutoring last year, students tend to concentrate on the actually tasks rather than the process of finding solutions. This article outline some important factors in authentic learning which some of them were missing in the last year’s learning activity.

Authentic learning activities should involve judgment, synthesis, research, practice and negotiation. Authentic learning activities should be close to real-world tasks of professionals; they are ill-defined problems with sustained investigation by learners from multiple sources and perspectives. Self learning as well as collaboration is needed for learners to make their own choice and reflect on their learning (Lombardi, 2007).

We had two authentic learning activities last year. The first one was to design a database to replace all the paper work of a pet clinic. The second activity was to design a website for a pet clinic. Compare both activities, the second learning activity was more successful; and in general learners were more motivated when working on it. In fact, both activities were based on real world scenario but they had different outcome.

Here are some possible explanations based on the suggestion of good authentic learning activity from Lombardi’s paper. First of all, even though both learning activities were based on real world scenarios, the first activity was not ill-defined. Instead, it provided an outline of what to do in order to complete all the tasks; hence students’ judgment and research were restricted by this outline. Secondly, learning tasks should require sustained investigation, however because of the outline of the learning tasks, students had little chance to carry out their investigation via the whole learning task. In other words, the first learning task provided little improvement space for students. This also reflected on the final product students handed in, for the first task, most of the assignment were with similar content and quality, on the other hand, most of the second assignments were very creative and extremely diverse.

Hence, when few parts were missing in authentic learning activity, learning outcome may be affected its design. Instead of trying to figure out the reason students did not meet the expectation; the first thing is possibly reviewing out learning activity. Really, learning how to help students to learn is just as hard as training one to be an expert.