As students, we've all been there: sitting at home, slaving away at a massive project as the sun starts to stain the sky that pre-dawn dark blue...or in a library, cramming for an exam, biting our nails down to nubs and wishing we'd just started reviewing earlier. (Let's be real...this may happen for each of us at some point this semester, in this very class.) We also may all agree that when an instructor's idea of an "A" for a big assignment is specifically broken down for us on paper, the preparation experience can feel much less stressful, more doable, and in turn, less likely to enable our avoidant habits like procrastination. (Although at times even the best of us give in to the procrastination demons...)
It is reassuring and reaffirming, then that in their research study "Student perspectives on rubric-referenced assessment," Andrade and Du have added to the mercifully limited collection of empirical (though qualitative) data that supports the use of rubrics in not only evaluation of student assessments, but in the actual learning process. When analyzing this data from undergraduate student focus groups, Andrade and Du found that students experienced less anxiety, considered their grades to be "better [and] fairer," could plan productively their approach to assignments, and were highly receptive to rubric-referenced feedback (Andrade & Du, 2005).
So, when it comes to making digestible, useful rubrics for our future students that can really measure their understanding, what are the rules of thumb? Chapter 5 in our UbD and DI suggest, for one, that nixing fanciful language like "sophisticated" or "elegant" and instead providing tangible directions like "explain your thinking in step-by-step order" (Tomlinson & McTighe 78) can be clarifying for students. Also, models (exemplars) can show what makes a paper "A" quality, for example.
My questions for all of you regarding this information are as follows--choose 1-2 to answer:
- Our authors in both the study and the text emphasize the importance of feedback in helping students improve their own performance. Think back to a time when you received 1) excellent feedback from an instructor, and 2) poor feedback from an instructor. What made 1) so excellent, and what made 2) so poor? How would you utilize these experiences to inform your future rubric or approach to assessment?
- When offering students a menu of options for showing what they know, the authors make sure to caution us that shifting the key criteria for an assignment is a big no-no--that is, we want all students to demonstrate that they have obtained the same knowledge, even if they took different routes to do so. However, for instructors, these varied yet same-at-the-core assessments may be more challenging and time-consuming to develop. What do you see as the primary challenges and benefits of giving multiple choices for summative assessments?
- In Andrade & Du's study, they bring up the idea that rubrics are useful for learning, as well as evaluation. I personally think it would be valuable to give students rubrics for as many assignments as possible--if not all. However, one concern is "spoiling" our students--ultra-clear rubrics of what to do to succeed won't follow them out of the classroom and into the real world. How can we avoid coddling and at the same time encourage actual learning from the rubrics we distribute?
- In y'all's field experiences, have you noticed formative or informal assessments taking place? What have they looked like? What is your mentor teacher's philosophy on assessment (if you haven't outright asked, give a guess).
Your thoughts, anecdotes, agreements/disagreements are appreciated!
As a history major, I must admit that my history professors (though they are incredibly smart) always assign papers, papers and more papers. I have had professors that give 3-4 prompt options, some that give options and examples about what that would look like, and a few that are incredibly teacher center. My experiences with these options of papers are that you write them, trying to answer every question in the prompt and given as many examples as you can, without exceeding the page requirement, then you turn them in, and eventually you get them back, with a grade and into your folder they go.
ReplyDeleteFor the most part, professors will give you their reasoning for your grade but for the most part there is never any self-evaluation. Unless the grade is extremely poor and you want to make sure the next paper gets better. Anyways, the point to the story is that I have never received a rubric from any of my history professors and have been forced to play the guessing game with them routinely.
Which is why I am a super fan of rubrics! I agree with everything that the readings say about, self-reflection, the clarity that rubrics provide for our students, fairness, and everything else in between. Furthermore, I think they are very helpful when it comes to grading because what you expected was (hopefully) clearly stated. Having said that, I am also very intimidated by rubrics. They feel like they could be really time consuming and could go terribly wrong if things are not clear. Nonetheless, I have been told that it's a wonderful tool for everyone involved and that it just takes time and practice to develop a technique.
Hey Emily,
ReplyDeleteTo answer your questions, I will tackle the last one first.
I have noticed that some teachers use formative assessments in the classroom, and the format of those informal assessments has varied wildly from teacher to teacher. In one class, the teacher took out last year's exam for the unit they were about to start, and started asking the students the questions from the exam. Now, the students didn't know that he was doing that, but it was effective in that the teacher had instant feedback about what the students knew and didn't know. Another teacher handed out a worksheet with questions on it that covered the material he was about to begin teaching. I think that formative assessments can be both fun and informative for both student and teacher.
I think the benefits of offering multiple assessments are fairly obvious, in that they give students with a variety of learning types a chance to express their learning in a way that benefits them personally the most. The problem, as you allude to, is how to fairly grade a variety of different assessments. For example, is writing a 10 page paper the same as making a poster? I think the answer lies in the rubric for each assessment. Sure, creating a poster might sound easier than writing a paper, but when you outline everything the student needs on the poster, and hold them to account for what they include and don't include, you can make both the paper and poster fair and equal assessments. It is time consuming as a teacher to come up with these ideas, but the students will benefit from your efforts.
Emily,
ReplyDeleteTo answer some of your questions, I don't believe that we are spoiling our students by giving them rubrics. I think to an extent that can be true, depending on the rubric itself, however that depends on the way the rubric is made. We clearly don't want to give our students all of the answers, or take the work out of the project, but we do not want to not give the students a clear guideline of what they are expected to do. Rubrics make assignments approachable and really show a student what is expected of them. We can make them clear and detailed enough without having to give away all the answers.
My two cents on your first question... my biggest pet peeve with teacher feedback is when it is illegible!!! How am I supposed to correct something if I can't read what I did wrong?...
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ReplyDeleteEmily,
ReplyDeleteI'll take a stab at responding to the first of the four questions you've posed to the group. As I'm sure has been the case with everyone here, I have received both excellent and poor feedback from teachers and professors. Excellent feedback, of course, is that which communicates in clear, direct terms the extent to which one has successfully met the criteria of a given assignment, as well the ways in which he or she has failed to do so. An essential characteristic of useful feedback is precision -- that is, it must assess strength and diagnose weakness in such a way as to enable the student to act on its prescriptions. Conversely, poor feedback often serves to obscure rather than illuminate areas of strength and weakness within an assignment, and thereby precludes the implementation of meaningful change. My experiences here in the MAT program have taught me the importance of providing students with feedback that they can use to help themselves achieve success. It is critical that we remember that some things, though they may make intuitive sense to educators and experts, will nevertheless present serious challenges for students.
I think in answer to that third bullet point, I agree students are trained to do what is expected of them and at some point in life when they aren't in school any more that level of dependency of expectation is no longer there, and those former students will not now how to handle the existential elements of life. So I think to answer the question making clear objectives can prevent a need for constant rubrics, like todays objectives are:.... and a student should be able to evaluate how well they have obtained that objective, or if the student knows what are the objectives, the student can think about that when doing the assignments that came from that day or weeks lesson.
ReplyDeleteIn my mentor teachers class, I've seen her give specific verbal rubrics, but in the tradition of some types of math class styles she gives a point based assessment without any explicit feedback, her assessments are number based, a student gets many problems wrong, or few problems wrong, I honestly don't believe she gives deep though into her assesment, for example a student with an IEP is in her class, and neither her nor the inclusion instructor has looked at what adaptations she needs or specifically in what area she is struggling in the class, instead they see that she is getting many problems wrong, or not doing problems and so the teacher feels she will not be able to stay in the class, I observed this in conversation, and rather than give the inclusion instructor an area to focus on, is she struggling with word problems? is it conversions? does she need visuals? no. she is getting problems wrong she shouldn't be in the class. The teacher has a similar approach to the rest of the students, I don't believe her form of assessment is affective for the students or for the improvement how lessons are taught.
In my eighth grade English class, my teacher had a successful system of giving feedback. In addition to some marks on our papers, he would provide us with an explanation of one thing we did really well and two things we could improve on. If a student turns in an assignment that does not meet our standards, we might have the tendency to only point out the parts that need improvement. Students may be discouraged by all of this "negative" feedback. Because of this the best feedback I have received from instructors included positive comments in addition to suggestions for improvements.
ReplyDeleteMy own personal experience will be of little use here, since I've always generally had a good idea for what the professor is looking for (vis a vis papers written). The better teachers/professors will take some time and give an outline of what they are looking for (which I suppose you can even call a rubric in a nominal way). Typically they will want the essential argument from a book or text you are reading and or comparisons between various texts with examples cited (from the texts) that support your thesis/argument. That is the "core" of a basic social studies paper, especially a basic history paper. However, given what I have seee during observation in CPS classrooms, wide swaths of CPS students cannot write even a basic paragraph and I have been told teaching "writing" or "to write" has been de-emphasized or eliminated from the English curriculum (which I find most bizarre to say the least). Of course, I think if you read enough, you won't really need many classes in learning how to write.. it will kind of "sink in" though reading osmosis. That brings up the other conundrum, getting the kids to read, which was difficult enough when they didn't have gaming systems, cellphones, apps, etc and the attention spans of a gnat. I do not know what the solution is, but the school where I am currently doing my observation (a CPS charter school) has just instituted a mandatory half hour of reading on Fridays, during one of their social studies classes (or history class) so they are clearly in agreement with my thinking on the matter. (that said.. not sure mandatory will be effective. but they will desperately try to find some kind of "hook". Our classmate Quinton may be happy to learn that my teacher tried a comic book format on a story about Ancient Egypt (for freshmen).
ReplyDeleteReturning to rubrics. This is something I have always struggled with in terms of making one/them up, since they didn't exist when I went to school - though I have completely bought into the concept and the studies on the matter. I think they're a fantastic idea - and student input (with instructor guidance) is also a great idea. Some of you may remember how we were able to adjust the weights and categories of a rubric for one of our assignments in Prof. Phillips class for Disciplinary Liteacy (CI504/404) last semester. The problem will be getting ourselves accustomed to and proficient at making good rubrics.
I think almost every teacher, almost by "instinct" makes formative assessments about their students and classrooms every day, though we have been taught a more thorough and methodical way to handle the matter.
Personally all my teachers gave me great feedback but while observing in one class a student asked the teacher what does he mean when he writes okay on a paper that the student has written for the class. The teacher's response was it's okay and the student looked at the teacher and asked what do you mean by that and the teacher responded that it's okay. To witness that exchange all I kept thinking was that it was the worse feedback I had ever seen from a teacher and in my head I kept thinking that he should have had a rubric.
ReplyDeleteHi Emily,
ReplyDeleteI think your question regarding the tension between the positive potentials of students learning with rubrics and the negative danger of "coddling" students with framing/evaluation devices that don't actually exist outside the classroom is a good one. I think the key is to keep rubrics open-ended so that they can encourage and assess multiple types of learning. With open-ended objectives the learning of the individual student is not foreclosed to the point where he is only evaluated upon a hypothetical set of standards that may not exist in the outside world. For instance, a good open-ended category within a rubric would be "Critical Analysis" which the student could demonstrate in multiple ways such as participation in group discussion, insightful journal entries, etc.... a not so great category would be "Vocabulary Spelling" wherein the student is assessed on only a single set of vocab words covered in the lesson plan. Designing rubrics in this way, imho, avoids "coddling" students as it mirrors the way in which people often have some idea of their responsibilities/expectations in the "outside world" which they fulfill/meet in creative and diverse ways.
The platitude of "life not coming with instructions" comes into direct conflict with allowing students to rely on rubrics as to what constitutes "A" work. Now, I would not be where I am sitting if I did not learn to play the game, to follow rubrics well and do what was expected of me to the best of my ability. From following rubrics, I may have learned more than I would like to admit; perhaps I would like to think that the things I know came about through my own effort and that of the things I focused on, none of it ought to be credited to the professors' rubrics. But that would be highly naive. I think a more fair criticism of rubrics rests question of purpose. Why are you doing this? Does this assignment really matter to you? But maybe asking that question is too selfish. We all have to perform against standards we do not agree with. So, in that sense, I guess rubrics are the most real sort of preparation we can provide for students entering the "real world." But, I think, the question of motivation still stands. Absent a rubric to tell you the ingredients of a good paper, a good presentation, or a good history portfolio, ask yourself: would you still perform the task if you knew it wasn't going to be graded? It's easy to say that we are good at something when we can fill in a template that says what excellence resembles, but it's hard to know your value as a producer when there's no set standard for greatness.
ReplyDelete