Standards for Authentic Achievement and Pedagogy

In their article, Wehlage, Newman, and Secada give what I think is an apt analysis of the potential disparity between the skills students are taught in a traditional school setting and what is actually needed for true intellectual development, or "authentic achievement". True "authentic achievement", as the authors define it, consists of three major factors that can often be neglected in traditional school settings. These factors include the ability to construct new knowledge out of a foundation of knowledge provided by others, the ability to conduct a "disciplined inquiry" (that is the ability to build on a knowledge base in a way that produces a deep and non-superficial understanding of the material), and the ability to build on learning that fosters skills applicable beyond the classroom. What I love about framing authentic achievement under these pre-requisites is that the definition is both simple and, as it seems to me, universally applicable to any specific subject matter. As a history major thinking back on my high school experience, for example, all of these factors have come into mind. In particular the first pre-requisite defined by the authors, the ability to construct new knowledge, struck me as a simple and obvious element that could often be neglected in my secondary education. For the vast majority of my high school experience, I treated history as the practice of memorizing and regurgitating names and dates. While it may have been implied, I was never explicitly told that  history was more about creating new ideas out of the information available than about simply memorizing that information. Simply having that concept of achievement in mind would frame history in a much different light for students, and would both make the subject more  attractive for them and encourage them to approach the material on an intellectual level.