ABSTRACT
In the USA, numerous developments in curriculum studies in the 1980s focused on authenticity in classrooms. To bring students to a sense of ownership in their learning, educators proposed that ‘hands-on’ projects, portfolios, and performance-based learning complement direct instruction of discrete skills, or segments of knowledge (Peters 1991, Mitchell 1992). Such activities involved collaborative and co-operative learning that assumed distribution of expertise across the classroom. While acknowledging continuing public demands for accountability, educators and policy-makers endorsed goals of integrating evaluation of student achievement with instruction and increasing opportunities for authentic tests of students’ abilities (Archbald and Newmann 1988, Frederiksen and Collins 1989, Wiggins 1989, Berlak 1992, Educational Leadership 1992). The situations for such authentic assessment ranged from oral history projects for local archives to programmes that brought business representatives into classes to hear panels, read papers, and engage students in discussion.
