Students immersed in authentic learning activities cultivate the kinds of "portable skills" that newcomers to any discipline have the most difficulty acquiring on their own: * The judgment to distinguish reliable from unreliable information * The patience to follow longer arguments * The synthetic ability to recognize relevant patterns in unfamiliar contexts * The flexibility to work across disciplinary and cultural boundaries to generate innovative solutions Learning researchers have distilled the essence of the authentic learning experience down to 10 design elements, providing educators with a useful checklist that can be adapted to anysubject matter domain.1.  Real-world relevance: Authentic activities match the real-world tasks of professionals in practice as nearly as possible. Learning rises to the level of authenticity when it asks students to work actively with abstract concepts, facts, and formulae inside a realistic-and highly social-context mimicking "the ordinary practices of the [disciplinary] culture."2.  Ill-defined problem: Challenges cannot be solved easily by the application of an existing algorithm; instead, authentic activities are relatively undefined and open to multiple interpretations, requiring students to identify for themselves the tasks and subtasks needed to complete the major task. 3.  Sustained investigation: Problems cannot be solved in a matter of minutes or even hours. Instead, authentic activities comprise complex tasks to be investigated by students over a sustained period of time, requiring significant investment of time and intellectual resources. 4.  Multiple sources and perspectives: Learners are not given a list of resources. Authentic activities provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from a variety of theoretical and practical perspectives, using a variety of resources, and requires students to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information in the process. 5.  Collabora