Chapter 9 – Assessment
Comments(4) I especially appreciated this week’s reading on assessment because I have found this to be one of the more difficult aspects of lesson planning and teaching. What type of assessment to use, how frequently, and in what forms are issues that I have been struggling with when it comes to unit planning as well. One tool of assessment that I have seen being used not only in my practicum school but here at UBC is a rubric. I believe that rubrics are helpful for teachers and students alike, because they give the teacher a specific set of criteria to use when marking which is not only efficient but fair, and they ensure that students know exactly what is expected of them before they hand in an assignment. I have heard some teachers say that they don’t want to give out a rubric or specific criteria about what is expected of students because it is like giving away the “answers.” I don’t agree with this at all; if we let students know exactly what they should be doing and learning, and they are able to produce the desired criteria, isn’t that exactly what we want our students to be doing? Why hide our expectations or make them a guessing game? I think rubrics can be especially helpful for ELLs by providing clear and explicit criteria for assignments.
I completely agree that transparency is key. I think it’s unfair to be judging student work based on invisible criteria. I understand the fear that rubrics could steer the direction that student work might take, but it doesn’t warrant the confusion that students suffer from. Unfortunately, I saw very little grading criteria being provided during my short practicum and recall the same thing from my own secondary school experience. I imagine this largely happens to allow greatly fluidity and flexibility for the teacher when grading, but it simply cannot justify the confusion it causes with the students and the lack of consistency within the marks.
I also agree with both of these posts and think that providing students a rubric on what they will be graded on is really important. I am fortunate to be in a placement school where rubrics are provided to the students in the course outline. My teachable is Physical Education, therefore rubrics are really important because PE is one of those subjects where there is really not a lot of written work to grade. At my practicum school the grades for each unit are 60% participation, 20% skills assessment and 20% a written test. The written test is not subjective at all and students either have the write answer or they do not. However, for both participation and skills assessment, the marking can be more subjective. This is why rubrics are so important because students know what they will be judged on, but it also forces teachers to be held accountable to what they are grading students on. This is important for teachers because when students or caretakers question certain marks, it is important that teachers can go back to their marks and show the rubric that each student is graded on and then show where that student fits in on the rubric. Overall, I believe that assessment is a very important part of teaching and that rubrics are a great tool to be used for assessment.
I agree, assessment is an interesting tool to consider when it comes to genuinely comprehending a student’s understanding of the material. Too often in my own education it felt like assessment came only in the form of summative assessment, that is, exams and testing. I grew up in Alberta where the standard for public schools is a series of provincial exams given to students in grades 3, 6, 9, and 12. For the 9 and 12 exams, each provincial was worth 50% of the final grade. This put a lot of pressure on both students and teachers to cater their curriculum towards teaching for the exam.
In the process of designing my own lesson and unit plans for arts, assessment is a stressful consideration for me, as there is no standard assessment guide for art. Most art educators create their own forms of assessment. For students this can be a stressful experience as expectations are not always clear cut. For example when learning to render form, an assessment criteria might sound something like:
• Demonstrates a clear understanding of the principles of art and design
• Use of variety of tones, lights and darks to create 3-dimensional objects
However helpful, I find these sorts of rubrics can still be misunderstood or misinterpreted. I like the idea of combining different forms of assessment, such as individual assessment, peer assessment, and finally teacher assessment. Having students peer edit or self assessment on certain projects gives them some autonomy and authority over their learning, instead of
In art, keeping visual journals or sketchbooks are a fantastic way to check in on student’s learning. Encouraging them to have a space for idea and technical development that is not constantly under the scrutiny of a teacher in class gives them room to express and hash out ideas.
Today we were having a discussion about assessment in another class, and we were given different types of rubrics than can be used for either formative or summative assessment. One thing that caught my attention was how almost all of them were constructed in a very repetitive way. The specifications for exemplary, good, satisfactory or needs improvement are not so different from each other actually. For example, one category for evaluating a resume is “effectiveness”, and the specifications would be “Format of the resume is clear…”, “Format of the resume is mostly clear…”, “Format of the resume is not very clear…”, “Format of the resume is utterly unclear…”. While this kind of approach does address the standards used for evaluating, we agreed students probably would have lost their interest by the time they get to the second one. After the class I checked again the section about making a rubric in chapter eight, and it seemed the book provided a much more practical way to make a rubric — create it with students. After all, a rubric does not help students at all if they can’t comprehend the meaning of different items. Thus it’s crucial to dissect the assignment with students and come up with important features that are actually meaningful to them. The rubric provided in the book also appears to be more flexible compared to most rubrics we normally see. Instead of making students feel they would inevitably fall into a certain category, this kind of rubric simply provides expectations so students will know clearly their goal. It’s really important for us to keep in mind that rubrics can be very effective or quite burdensome. Depending on the subjects we teach, creating rubrics that cater to the subject and students will be a key step for assessment.