Sean's Blog: rubrics

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Rubric design to support assessment in Middle School

The challenge with assessment is giving targeted and goal directed feedback quickly to students so they can improve and move forward with the learning. Our Online Learning Platform (Teamie) can help streamline this process for both teachers and students so you can spend less time worrying about finding student work and copying and pasting feedback and work more efficiently.

This blog post outlines how to;

Take a rubric containing reportables and our new scale and add this to Teamie
Create an assignment to collect in a Google Doc
Associate the rubric with created assignment
Give targeted feedback based on your reportables

If you want to video version of this guide jump here.

Why are rubrics an important assessment tool?

This is an example of a rubric that we are creating to help give feedback to students. The example shown here illustrates the connection between our five point scale and what is possible for each learning outcome or "I Can Statement."

For instance it is hard for students to demonstrate an exemplary ability in some of the communication skills goals such as writing a claim, so the box is greyed out.

For the rubric to be an effective assessment tool the task itself needs to be designed and written in such as way that it aligns with the learning outcomes we have chosen, thus giving students scope to reach the top levels. The alignment of assessment method such as a selected response, written or performance task to the learning outcome is always crucial in giving students clear opportunities to succeed.

Getting started with Rubrics in Teamie:

You can take the same text as shown above and add this into Teamie to create your own rubric which can be attached to an assignment. Assignments allow you to collect in one or more documents from each student and track attempts, deadlines and send notifications.

There is no magic button where you can import any random rubric in a Google Doc into Teamie as the formatting is always different but the online editor is easy to use.

Firstly, you need to first make an assignment from which you can attach a rubric to as shown below.

You now have the option to either search the rubric bank for ones that colleagues have made. (search by name) or to create your own one from a blank template. Click to create from top right corner.

You will always be able to go back and reuse your rubrics when you next make an assignment.

The following screenshot shows the rubric editor. You begin with one criteria and four levels which you can all adjust. All of the text boxes are editable but when you actually mark the work online you can see the criteria title but need to hover to see the detailed criteria.

To take the original rubric I began by copying the learning goals into the heading and some of the other detail into the descriptor. I then copied the scale descriptors into the boxes as shown below. Once complete there is a clever duplicate button which saves time when adding the next criteria.

Then duplicating allows you to add subsequent criteria but keep the same scales. Some departments might choose to give more specific guidance for each scale specific to assessed learning goals or "I Can Statements" but you can equally keep this the same and simpler for students to use.

Using your rubric to provide feedback on student work:

Once you have made the rubric you can step to open a submission and give feedback. You can open the rubric from the right hand sidebar and you can drag it around the page. Once you click on the level it will automatically save your selection.

You can also leave more precise feedback on each learning outcome by clicking on the add comment option at the end of each learning outcome title. This will save you comment in either text or audio to the sidebar comment stream so students can see. You can hide these comments from students.

Publishing and viewing assessment data from your Markbook

For students to see you final feedback you will need to go back to the assignment submission page and select all and then publish grades for them to be notified of the feedback. A clever trick is to publish these all at once in class and ask students to reflect and add their own learning goals into the comment stream for you to refer back to.

The collated data across multiple assignments that you mark within Teamie is available in your markbook and you can select on one student to see an overview of the year. Eventually you will be able to see a mastery overview of how students are progressing against all of your learning goals for multiple assessments but you might have to wait until next year for this !

The video overview

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Not another Test/Rubric...?

http://www.hippoquotes.com/assessing-quotes

Assessment drives everything educational. So, not surprisingly, assessment is the biggest factor in terms of planning the use of tech in effective ways. This means that it's critical to ensure that we use a varied range of assessment strategies, which is where I find a surprising lack of options.

Why do so many teachers assume that only rubrics and tests are suitable for assessment? Sure they have their place but only within a suite of assessment strategies...

I don't mean to denigrate any particular assessment tool—clearly rubrics and tests can be effective assessment tools, but when they dominate, they have an unfortunate tendency to diminish the importance and efficacy of all of the other tools that are available. It is depressingly common to me that in virtually any educational context (classroom, conference, online) when the conversation inevitably turns to assessment, the question seems to default to, 'what rubric or test will we use?' rather than any awareness that there are a plethora of other tools and strategies that could be just as effective if not more so.

Do less, but do it better.

Now of course it's highly possible that teachers are unaware of the wider range of assessment tools they use effectively almost everyday, such as the ad hoc/informal conversations (conferences in the jargon) with students every day, to spirited class debates (not lectures) that utlise skilful Socratic strategies, which are in and of themselves valid assessment tools. The problem is that I think these are seen as somehow inferior to a "proper" test/rubric. All this does is create a lose/lose scenario for the teacher and the student. Rather than focusing on tests and rubrics, wouldn't it be better for everyone if we were to embrace a much wider tool kit when it comes to assessment? To see them all as valid/powerful, maybe that conversation/conference was so effective that adding a rubric or a test is not only unnecessary but possibly even counter productive?

I think if you had asked most teachers why it is that they rely so strongly upon rubrics and tests as opposed to all of the other powerful forms of assessment, I think you would find that they would point to one sad fact; they feel they need paper with marks on, that they can attach a grade to, so they can point to it as being hard evidence of their assessment judgement. While there is clearly a place for this kind of formal (usually summative) judgement, in my experience it is far too frequent and far too common. Teachers could do themselves a favour and do their students a favour by focusing on the goal of learning rather than the need to have a hard artefact to present evidence of every stage of progress.

What if instead we were to focus on the goal, that is, as long as the assessment tools you use allow you to provide effective individual feedback to the student and enables them to progress in their learning point where they are improving compare to their previous level of competence (ipsative assessment), then the goal has been achieved! So why not work a little smarter and use a range of assessment tools that are a far more varied. In so doing you create a classroom environment that is more dynamic, and far more effective for both the teacher and the student.

So what does this have to do with tech?

From my perspective, a classroom that exploits a wide range of assessment tools is a much richer environment within which to be able to integrate digital tools that can truly enhance and transform the way teachers teach and the way the students learn, and demonstrate the extent to which they have mastered the skills, knowledge and understanding that is truly the point, not just in ways that can be measured quantitatively on another test or a rubric. You don't have to look much further than an early childhood classroom to see this in action. Why? One thing their students can't do is demonstrate their understanding via tests or rubrics!

I've always found this matrix from the PYP to be particularly useful to illustrate this, although you may be surprised by the omission of tests from this grid, I believe they (somewhat disparagingly?) categorise these as 'check lists':

From Making the PYP Happen (IBO)

From the 'old days'—not new, but not common either.

If you really insist on using rubrics, a nice way to use them is for the teacher to define a central standard (eg a level 3 on a 5 point scale) and then ask the students to define and justify the level they feel their work sits in comparison to that, with examples.