Designing an assessment rubric

Hi everyone!

Have you ever created a rubric? I hope so, because nowadays rubrics are so trendy in education. It is true that they seem innovative but actually they were used some years ago. As far as I am concerned, rubrics are so useful to assess students. During my internship period, I just used simple assessment criteria, but I realized that it is not an accurate method. Rubrics are an accurate way to evaluate learners as well as a good option to save time when assessing students.

How can we do a rubric? Well, we must include these elements:

what to include in a rubric de Carmen Olmedo

I created this poster using Canva, because as I told you in previous post, it is a pretty good web site to do posters and online presentation. They look great in your blog entries.

Before creating the rubric, I did a mind map to have a clear idea about my Open Educational Project and its respective learning missions. I used the tool MindMeister because not only it is an easy web site to create mind maps, but also because I want my students to use it and create artifacts in their learning missions. I had to use it to see how it works before telling learners to go there. 

There you go the mind map which summarize my OEP (you can place the mouse pointer in the mind map to scroll down/up/right/left and read all its elements):

Class Blog about learning process, experiences, likes, and dislike. by Carmen Olmedo

Back to my concern, I planned a rubric to assess my students and based on my Open Educational Project. The rubric is quite general since I want to use it for any of the learning missions that I planned. Taking into account this, I will follow the next rubric to evaluate the different tasks and I will modify it if it is necessary for a specific task. If I need to modify the rubric, I will add a short sentence in each criteria but I do not modify the criteria I wrote at all. Hence, I used the tool Quick Rubric since I can change my rubric whenever I need it. 

Rubric to assess 21th students about PBL from carmen olmedo

I have embedded the rubric in my blog but you can click here and zoom it in. This time I used SlideShare to upload the document because I like the way in which it appears in my entry: the embedded artifact is bigger than using other tools.

As it can be seen, I have included five main elements to assess my students:

• Group work and individual work.
• Vocabulary and grammar.
• Thinking skills.
• Content knowledge.
• Final outcome.
• 
  

I am of the opinion that these five elements are crucial to assess learners and I will explain why:

I consider vital to take into account the group work as well as the individual work, although the final outcomes will be group task. Some students are good at working by themselves while others are good at collaborating in a group, but nowadays both facts are essential. In this way, each student will be assessed fairly.

Content is always vital and necessary to be assessed, since students have to learn some facts, competences and skills. Nonetheless, it is significant not only the content but also the mechanics or the accuracy with which they will transmit that content. In CLIL subjects, content and language are equally important. 

This content knowledge and vocabulary might be based on remembering and understanding, so Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) will be taken into account. I will assess some thinking skills related to creativity, analysis and evaluation. These days, these High Order Thinking Skills are not developed well at school but they are even more important than recalling and repeating. 

Finally, I will evaluate their final outcome because it will reflect their learning process and effort. The task, that is submitted, must always be assessed.

Apart from that, I would like my students to be self-assessed following the next rubric that I will provide them:

Students rubric from carmen olmedo

I do not want to just take into consideration my observation but also students' perception of their own learning. Besides, it is a way of developing evaluation and they will be conscious about their learning and aptitude. 

REFLECTION

I realized that creating rubrics is quite hard work, although it is true that teachers save time using them to assess students. In our ICT module, our professor uses rubrics to assess us and, what it more, we have access to that information, what I find crucial and handy. If I know what criteria the teacher uses, I know what is expected from me and I will base my actions on that. I believe our professor expend many hours planning those rubrics full of details. 

Doing this rubric was not as easy as I thought because it is necessary to bear in mind your Open Educational Project and your learning missions clearly. I had to have a clear idea about it to establish my specific criteria. 

In my humble opinion, one has to do several rubrics to create good ones as those that we could read in our ICT module. Furthermore, it can be necessary to carry out the learning mission to know clearly how to assess our students.

I decided to use a scale from 0 to 3 in order to be more accurate since I found quite simple to use a minor scale. The more criteria we plan, the more accurate we will be assessing students. 

I felt so happy to use the tool Quick Rubric because at last we could download an artifact with no watermark and freely. However, this web site does not offer possibility to embed the rubric or a link to share it with people. 

To sum up, this time I learnt how to use new tools such as Quick Rubric (which I highly recommend for teachers), SlideShare, and MindMesiter. I consider I kept working hard one more time. Besides, I changed my mind: this challenge changed my way of assess ing students, now I will use rubrics. 

Well, that's all for this post.

Hope you like my artifacts, see you soon and remember:

BE CLEVER, BE GREENER!