Assessing our students seems to be such a loaded statement. Today when administration doesn't stand as firmly behind the teacher, you want to make sure that EVERY point is accounted for and all i's dotted and all t's crossed!
Since I am not in the classroom anymore, obviously assessing my students is a little easier! HOWEVER, since I am in the business of creating good assessments as well as good assessing tools! One challenge that we have with online learning is creating good alternative assessments aside from the test. It is good in one way because it allows us to be creative as well as create environments where our students truly can shine. On the other hand, we also need to create detailed, thorough, well-thought-out rubrics that can assess our student's artifacts.
To be honest, I think rubrics are hard to create because they are hard to create fair. The reality is...if a teacher is given a word document or an amazing power point presentation...it is hard to not account for all the hard wok that went into that ppt. SO, how to grade content for content. Well, because we are human...I am going to go with...it's hard...needs to be done...but hard!
Therefore, my goal this year as I am working with my SMEs on their projects is to really look in depth at what they present as projects as well as what they present to assess those projects. When I get to that point...I will let you know how that goes! :)
For me, rubrics provide students with the level of details expected for a particular assignment. It isn't necessarily a checklist, but one could be formulated from the rubric, and students have the expectations for their work laid out for them. I don't think rubrics are that hard to make, but I've been doing them for a long time. In order to fairly judge student art, there has to be some common strands with which to judge students. All students are not equally artistically talented. When I first started using them, I didn't call them rubrics, I called them expectations. Perhaps I've been using rubrics wrongly, but I didn't want students who lacked confidence in their artistic ability to feel like they couldn't do great art. Rubrics helped me level the playing field between the talented students and the not so talented.
ReplyDeleteI love Jeanine's statement, "Rubrics helped me level the playing field between the talented students and the not so talented." For me, the not so talented, lazy, throw things together at the last minute students would always receive low grades. But I realize that assessments are meant to assess how well students master the standards, not how pretty they make their artifacts. So I give my students rubrics for all major assignments and every project so they know exactly what is expected. One thing I do not include on my rubrics is aesthetics. It's not a part of the science GPS so it shouldn't be included on my rubrics. While it's hard to give the same grade for a project that was thrown together at the last minute and one that was clearly worked on for hours I know that I'm grading fairly and assessing what really matters. Like Jeanine, rubrics help me level the playing field so all students have equal opportunities to succeed.
ReplyDeleteTwila, I agree with you in that creating rubrics can be sometimes cumbersome especially when the project is a complex task. I think the essential thing is to focus on what you want students to get out of from the project. Once your objectives of the task is clear, rubrics can be easier to create! Thank you for your thoughtful discussion!
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