Authentic Assessment in Challenge-Based Learning: How to Assess 21st-Century Skills in Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education

Authentic assessment is crucial in experiential learning teaching pedagogy, such as challenge-based learning (CBL). Most university teachers know how to assess and judge the knowledge levels of their engineering students but need to learn more about assessing 21st-century skills and how the assessment influences the learning process beyond the education initiative. Therefore, this chapter first studies the connections between the learning process and the authentic assessment, specifically in acquiring skills in innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) education initiatives, and secondly discusses how to authentically assess student skills. To achieve that scope, we compare and critically discuss four I&E education experiences from the University of Trento and HIT (Italy), and Linköping University (Sweden). We identify five main findings where we highlight direct quotes from students: (i) facilitation and coaching are essential, (ii) development-oriented feedback from teachers helps students to acquire new knowledge and improve their skills, (iii) formative assessment – both informal and formal – through matrices can help teachers in measuring progressions and difficulties in individual students, (iv) the ENTRECOMP framework is a valuable tool for I&E education initiatives in both authentic assessment and soft skills evaluation, and (v) the assessment tools present advantages and disadvantages. Our results underline the importance of authentically assessing skills on two levels (the individual and the team) through recognized and well-described tools. Second, personalized self-directed learning tools and tailor-made learning criteria are also beneficial but have limitations. Finally, formative assessment matrices are also helpful because they define requirements for different levels.