Quality Rubrics / Evolution of a Rubric. One of my favorite things about Twitter is the copious among of sharing that occurs among education users. In addition to the great conversation, teachers are often sharing resources they've developed or come across. Today, John Calvert (@jcalvert4) shared a rubric he'd developed based on another educator's rubric. I thought it would be interesting to explore how a rubric can evolve in our efforts to make our expectations more explicit and to help students to understand what degrees of quality look like.
First, many thanks to John for letting me wander through his rubric and share my thinking. Second, it's my philosophy that while there's no such thing as a "perfect" rubric, there's also no such thing as a "bad" rubric. The original rubric appears to be designed to help professors communicate with their students about what they're looking for on a discussion board. Evolution of an Online Discussion Rubric Challenges with version #1: Revisions that John made: John's rubric is below. Www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/digiassass_eada.pdf. Assessing Student Learning - core principles. Enhancing learning by enhancing assessment Assessment is a central element in the overall quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Well designed assessment sets clear expectations, establishes a reasonable workload (one that does not push students into rote reproductive approaches to study), and provides opportunities for students to self-monitor, rehearse, practise and receive feedback.
Assessment is an integral component of a coherent educational experience. The ideas and strategies in the Assessing Student Learning resources support three interrelated objectives for quality in student assessment in higher education. The relationship between assessment practices and the overall quality of teaching and learning is often underestimated, yet assessment requirements and the clarity of assessment criteria and standards significantly influence the effectiveness of student learning. For most students, assessment requirements literally define the curriculum. Effective Assessment. When you hear the word assessment, what comes to mind? Neat rows of students, neatly filling in rows of Scantron bubbles, the results of which will be displayed numerically in the neat rows of an excel sheet then transferred to the columns of students’ transcripts.
Often, this sort of assessment feels like an afterthought, something that happens once the learning is done. But assessment is so much more than this; you can use the assessment techniques detailed in these pages to more clearly define and describe the goals of your course, receive mid- term feedback that improves your teaching strategies, provide students with more experiential learning opportunities, and teach students to self- evaluate thereby increasing their independent learning skills.
Our assessment resources are divided into three sections, Learning Goals and Objectives, Testing and Grading, and Using Student Feedback. Home | AALHE. Student Assessment | vuDAT (Virtual University Design & Technology) Student assessment is one of the key issues in education. How do we know if students have learned what we are trying to teach them? There are multiple forms of assessment available. We believe that offering varied methods is the best model. You will find in the following documents some examples of different types of assessment, and how some MSU faculty have used them.
Assessing student performance Assessing student performance in an online course is similar to classroom assessment. Assessment can be based on writing an individual paper, preparing a group presentation, class participation, attendance, homework problem sets, exams (essay, short answer, multiple choice, true/false), and so on. Ideally the assessment process informs the teacher and the learner about learner progress and at the same time, contributes to the learning process. Feedback on assessment Feedback is a very important part of learning.
What is it you want your students to learn? Examples that are not appropriate: The Assessment Triangle - Enhancing Education. Grading vs. Assessment of Learning Outcomes - Enhancing Education. There is often confusion over the difference between grades and learning assessment, with some believing that they are totally unrelated and others thinking they are one and the same. The truth is, it depends. Grades are often based on more than learning outcomes. Instructors’ grading criteria often include behaviors or activities that are not measures of learning outcomes, such as attendance, participation, improvement, or effort. Although these may be correlated with learning outcomes, and can be valued aspects of the course, typically they are not measures of learning outcomes themselves.1 However, assessment of learning can and should rely on or relate to grades, and so far as they do, grades can be a major source of data for assessment. To use grades as the basis for learning outcomes, grades would first have to be decomposed into the components that are indicators of learning outcomes and those that are indicators of other behaviors.
For example: