Students must be able to apply their learning to authentic, or real-world, problems and situations. Newmann and Wehlage (1995) define authentic achievement as the "construction of knowledge, through disciplined inquiry, to produce discourse, products, and performances that have meaning beyond success in school" (p. 11). They explain the importance of such applications:
"When students construct knowledge, they organize, synthesize, interpret, explain, or evaluate information. To do this well, they must build on prior knowledge that others have produced. As they assimilate prior knowledge, they should hone their skills through guided practice in producing original conversation and writing, through building physical objects, or through artistic or musical performances.
However, conventional curriculum excessively emphasizes reproducing knowledge: memorizing algorithms to solve routine mathematical problems, for example, or naming the different functions of parts of speech, or matching authors with titles and explorers with their feats." (pp. 8-9)
