Designing the digital in authentic assessment: is it fit for purpose?

Authentic assessment aligns higher education with the practices of students’ future professions, which are increasingly digitally mediated. However, previous frameworks for authentic assessment appear not to explicitly address how authenticity intersects with a broader digital world. This critical scoping review describes how the digital has been designed into authentic assessment in the higher education literature. Our findings imply that the digital was most often used to enhance assessment design and to develop students’ digital skills. Other purposes for designing the digital into assessment were less present. Only eight studies situated the students within the wider context of digital societies, and none of the studies addressed students’ critical digital literacies. Thus, while there are pockets of good practice found within the literature, the vast majority of the studies employed the digital as an instrumental tool for garnering efficiencies. We suggest that in order to fit its purpose of preparing students for the digital world, the digital needs to be designed into authentic assessment in meaningful ways.