Researchers tout digital learning as a tool that can increase the authenticity of student learning and assessment tasks but lack a psychometrically valid instrument to test this hypothesis. Further, there are several complementary definitions of authentic work, versus a single agreed upon definition, presented in academic literature. I synthesized this literature to develop the Authentic Online Work Rubric that measures two primary components of authentic online work – opportunities for higher-order thinking and real-world relevance. Data were collected from online courses developed by one of the largest online course providers in the United States. I validated the scale using principal component analysis before generating a lesson-level standardized coefficient using item response theory for both the higher-order thinking and real-world relevance subscales. The use of this rubric facilitates the measurement of authentic work and is targeted for use in the evaluation of learning tasks and assessments in online instructional settings to support researcher, developer, and school-based continuous improvement processes.

研究人员将数字学习吹捧为一种可以提高学生学习和评估任务真实性的工具，但缺乏一种心理测量学上有效的工具来检验这一假设。此外，在学术文献中，有几个关于真实作品的互补定义，而不是单一的商定定义。我综合这些文献来开发真实在线工作量规，衡量真实在线工作的两个主要组成部分——高阶思维的机会和现实世界的相关性。数据来自美国最大的在线课程提供商之一开发的在线课程。在使用项目响应理论为高阶思维和现实世界相关性子量表生成课程级标准化系数之前，我使用主成分分析验证了量表。使用此量规有助于衡量真实工作，并旨在用于在线教学环境中的学习任务和评估评估，以支持研究人员、开发人员和基于学校的持续改进过程。