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This paper presents the first results of an ongoing research project on authentic tasks in university teaching. International and national literature conceptualises competence-based education as a paradigm centred on the integration of knowledge, skills, and action oriented dispositions in meaningful contexts, with particular emphasis on the transfer and mobilisation of resources (Castoldi, 2017; Mulder, 2017; European Commission, 2018). Within this framework, authentic tasks are recognised as key pedagogical and assessment devices: they engage students in complex performances grounded in real or plausible problems and evaluated through transparent criteria (Wiggins, 1990; Gulikers et al., 2004; Castoldi, 2011). By requiring strategic decision-making and critical reflection, they foster student agency and responsibility in learning (Castoldi, 2020).

Competence-based education is understood here as an instructional design approach aligning objectives, teaching methods, and assessment with the integrated mobilisation of resources to address meaningful tasks (Castoldi, 2017). An authentic task, accordingly, is defined as a situated performance requiring the integration and transfer of knowledge and culminating in an observable product assessed through shared rubrics (Castoldi, 2011; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).

This perspective is further enriched by the paradigm of Embodied Education, which frames learning as an embodied, situated, and relational process (Reeves et al., 2021; Singh, 2021). By emphasising experiential and contextual dimensions, this approach strengthens competence-based design and orients authentic tasks toward active engagement in both concrete and simulated environments. It also addresses key quality concerns identified in the literature, particularly the risk of “surface authenticity” and the need to ensure relevance and meaningfulness in assessment practices (Gravett, 2025; Villarroel et al., 2020).

Despite their wide promotion in European primary and secondary education systems (European Commission, 2018), authentic assessment practices remain limited and uneven in higher education (Vlachopoulos & Makri, 2024; McArthur, 2022). Although the Bologna Process (1999) formally embedded a competence-based perspective within European Higher Education through comparable National Qualifications Frameworks, university assessment still often privileges knowledge reproduction or generic performance testing (Stankov & Heffernan, 2024), This occurs at the expense of authentic assessment conceived as situated, reflective, and socially meaningful, and evaluated according to professional or citizenship standards.

Against this backdrop, the study investigates how and under what conditions authentic tasks can maintain a strong anchorage to competence-based education while fostering a genuinely formative approach. This approach must be capable of integrating conceptual abstraction with critical application to future professional contexts, in coherence with the Dublin Descriptors.

The research pursues three interconnected aims: to identify the defining criteria of authentic tasks as formative and evaluative tools in university teaching; to analyse current university practices in order to highlight strategies and critical issues; and to develop an operational framework to support the design, review, and evaluation of authentic tasks across disciplinary domains. Methodologically, the study combines a systematic literature review with an empirical inquiry based on the analysis of university-level authentic tasks and semi-structured interviews with instructors. The comparison between theoretical and empirical findings is currently informing the development and validation of a structured checklist designed to ensure methodological rigour, clarity, usability, and adaptability across academic contexts.