Designing a rubric for assessment

Hi inno-teachers!

And now is time to create a rubric for assessing our students! In this post I am going to present to you the rubric that I have designed in order to evaluate my students in my OEP: Namasté! Moreover, I will include some basic elements to take into account when designing a rubric such as the elements that it should contain or an interesting website to create it online.

Recovered from: www.xtlearn.net

Why is assessment important?

To assess means to ask students about their understanding of the subject matter. Assessment is an integral part of instruction because it determines if the goals of education have been met or not. There are different ways of assessing our students, but if we want to be good teachers, that critical moment in th teaching-learning process should contain some of the following characteristics:

• It provides diagnostic feedback.
• It helps educatiors set standards.
• It evaluates progress.
• It relates to a student's progress.
• It motivates performance.
• It allows teacher-self evaluation.

"Assessment is the engine which drives student learning". (John Cowan)

Rubrics for evaluation are one of the tools for facilitating teachers the task of assessment. A rubric for assessment is a tool that clearly indicates marking criteria. It can be used for marking assignments, class participation, or overall grades.

I decided to create a rubric for assessing my students; and, for this reason, I drew from the final outcome of my OEP (you can check it by clicking here and here). When creating a rubric is important to consider the final outcome that the students are going to produce since it reflects all the work done during the whole project.

The elements of a rubric

I have just mention that rubrics are a good tool for teachers; but, what should a rubric contain? Before designing my rubric I started to investigate the essential features of a good rubric for evaluation. After doing that, I arrived to the conclusion that we cannot create rubrics just for creating them. We have to follow a serie of steps so as to design a quality instrument for such an important evaluation process.

One important thing to consider are the elements that it should contain: aspects of learning process, criteria, scale of ratings and clear description.

To summarize all the steps I would like to add an image that I have created with Canva:

Social Media – Untitled Design by ana94marquez 

How did I create a rubric for my OEP?

After having a clear idea of what I wanted to add in my rubric, I started to design it. First of all, I created a scheme in order to organize all the steps that I wanted to include (this scheme was designed by hand). Next, I started to prototype the rubric using a computer program named Quick Rubric. I registered myself on the webpage and I started to design it. Quick Rubric is a brilliant program for teachers in that it is very intuitive and easy to use (you just have to add the desired columms and rows and edit the criteria, the ratings and the descriptors). The five criteria that I decided to include in my rubric (and having in mind the elements that a good rubric should contain) are the following ones: content knowledge, language, creativity, group work and mechanics.
Once I had it, I uploaded the PDF to SlideShare (which is the platform I always choose to upload academic work).

Here you can see my work:

Rubric for assessment de Ana Márquez

Apart from the teacher rubric (that will help him or her to evaluate the pupils), I consider it is necessary to create a rubric for the students in order for them to check their learning process. I elaborated it and I uploaded it to SlideShare so as to be available to all teachers that want to consult it. You can also see it by clicking here.

Rubric for students de Ana Márquez

And now is time to reflect on the learning that I have acquired thanks to this challenge.

Before this challenge, I knew that evaluation was an essential part of the teaching-learning process; but, regarding rubrics, I had only created one or two before that moment. For the elebaration of the rubrics I had always used Microsoft Word. This program can be a good one, but, after discovering QuickRubric, I am pretty sure that I will keep using this last one. QuickRubric is a brilliant tool for teachers in order to create their own rubrics for units' assessment.

In addition, I recommend you to create an scheme before starting designing your rubirc. It will be helpful due to the fact that you can visualize at a glance all the assessment criteria that you want to include. As I have already said, I created mine by hand, but I encourage you to design your own using any of the online tools we have already been working with such as Google Drive.

Moreover, I would like to highlight the need of creating a rubric for students to be aware of their learning process. I stongly believe that students are an essential part of the teaching-learning process. For this reason, they should know in all moment what is expected from them. A motivating rubric can encourage students to keep learning and to improve in their work.

All in all, I would like to share my opinion about evaluation in education. In some cases, I have observed that most teachers do not take their time to design a good evaluation plan. But, in my opinion, evaluating is essential in the learning process. It is true that, for teachers, it takes a lot of time; but if we think in our students' needs, we will spend that time without expecting anything in return.

And after sharing this moment with you, I only have to add...

See you soon, inno-teachers!