Grading - Assessment

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Grading - Assessment

• How do you do it well?
• Reflections on
• power
• cloning -- mini me
• clarity and/or clarivoyance -- Kreskin
• destructive and/or generative
• draining and/or empowering
• formative and/or summative
• etc.

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Grading Exercise

• Individually read the short essay and grade it as
  you normally would
• Discuss the grade you have assigned to the paper
  and why in small groups
• Choose a reporter for the group (you may use flip
  charts)
• Group reports and discussion

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Assessment Clear and Simple

• Insights from Barbara Walvoord

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Assessment and Rubrics

• An important key to direct assessment based
  on classroom work is making criteria very clear
  and explicit in writing. in short, you need what
  is often called a rubric. A rubric articulates
  in writing the various criteria and standards
  that a faculty member uses to evaluate student
  work.
• (Barbara E. Walvoord, Assessment Clear and
  Simple, 19)

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Rubrics - Assessment Tools

• Rubrics are one of the handiest aids to
  educators since the invention of the blackboard.
  
• Stevens and Levi, Introduction to Rubrics

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Rubrics definition

• At its most basic, a rubric is a scoring tool
  that lays out the specific expectations for an
  assignment. Rubrics divide an assignment into its
  component parts and provide a detailed
  description of what constitutes acceptable or
  unacceptable levels of performance for each of
  the parts.
• -- Dannelle D. Stevens and Antonia J. Levi
• Introduction to Rubrics

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Rubrics and exams

• More students fail exams because they do not
  follow the instructions on number of questions
  and length of answers, than through lack of
  knowledge.
• Try your paper out on a naïve reader
  (rather than on a colleague who knows the form),
  and see if it is easy to understand exactly what
  the rubric is instructing candidates students
  to do.
• (Brown, Race, and Smith, 500 Tips on Assessment,
  74)

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Rubric - Four Basic Parts

• Task description (the assignment - paper, poster,
  presentation, etc.)
• A scale that indicates level of achievement
  (grades or numeric values-- feedback re skill
  level of subject mastery)
• The dimensions of the assignment (skills,
  knowledge involved, etc.)
• Descriptions of what constitutes each level of
• performance all set out on a grid (Stevens
  and Levi, 5-6, 8)

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Why Use Rubrics?

• To provide timely meaningful feedback save
  time
• To prepare students to use detailed feedback in
  critiquing their own and others work
• To encourage critical thinking about learning,
  writing, and skill development
• To facilitate communication with others -- foster
  collaborative learning
• To help us to refine our teaching skills for
  student learning
• To level the playing field for all students
• (Stevens and Levi, 17-28)

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Constructing a Rubric

• Reflecting on what students ought to achieve
  through the assignment and how well it worked
  previously and why.
• Listing specific learning objectives for the
  assignment.
• Grouping and labeling expectations and learning
  objectives -- organization, analysis, citations
• Applying or creating a rubrics grid with criteria
  specified
• (Stevens and Levi, 29-46)

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The ICE Approach

• Ideas (students convey the fundamentals, basic
  facts, vocabulary/definitions, details, elemental
  concepts)
• Connections (students demonstrate the
  relationship or connection among basic concepts
  and demonstrate a relationship or connection
  between what was learned and what they already
  know)
• Extensions (students use their new learning in
  novel ways, answer questions outside of the
  intended or initial learning) connected to the
  work of Piaget, Biggs and Collis, and other
  cognitive developmental theorists
• (Sue Fostaty Young Robert J. Wilson,
  Assessment and Learning The ICE Approach, 5-8)

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Grading with Rubrics

• Establish performance anchors
• Provide detailed, formative feedback
• Support individualized, flexible, formative
  feedback through a scoring guide
• Convey summative feedback (grade)
• Stevens and Levi, 73-94

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Helpful Links
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Resources

• Barbara E. Walvoord, Assessment Clear and Simple,
  San Francisco Jossey- Bass, 2004.
• Robert M. Diamond, Designing Assessing Courses
  Curricula, San Francisco Jossey-Bass, 1998.
• Dannelle D. Stevens and Antonia J. Levi,
  Introduction to Rubrics, Sterling, Virgina
  Stylus, 2005.
• Sue Fostaty Young and Robert J. Wilson,
  Assessment Learning The ICE Approach,
  Winnipeg, Canada Portage Main Press, 2000.
• Sally Brown, Phil Race Brenda Smith, 500 Tips
  on Assessment, London Kogan Page Limited, 1996.