Authentic Assessments and Rubrics
Module One

Carol Amberg - Course Designer

OCTOBER
Designing and Using Authentic Assessments: Rubrics

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

Participants will:
1) Increase their knowledge and understanding of authentic assessments
2) Design tasks which will generate student work that will have an audience beyond the teacher.
3) Write rubrics for the tasks.
4) Reflect upon design and implementation with colleagues at their home schools.
5) Reflect upon their own and their students' reactions to these tasks and assessments, as well as the quality of the work produced by their students guided by their rubrics.
6) Collect rubrics and reflections.
(This collection will be referred to as the participant's PRODUCT.)

COURSE TASKS:

Each month, participants will:
1) Work on either the design or implementation of an authentic assessment.
2) Ask questions (as needed) of the course designer via e-mail: camberg@gcs.neric.org.
3) Record and submit a guided reflection on-line.

INTRODUCTION / READING:

In order for an assessment to be authentic, it must first be tied to an authentic task. This is a task which has value beyond the classroom and has an audience (or potential audience) beyond the teacher. (Students know this up front.) This audience could be quite LOCAL:

  

That audience, whomever it may be, will need to have an idea of the task and the criteria which has been set down as the markers of its successful completion. This is the function of the rubric. A well-written rubric will communicate the parameters and quality expected of the product or performance.

Having to delineate what's to be done, and how well, also helps the teacher identify and bring into focus the proficiencies of which she/he is seeking evidence. In other words, I, the teacher, need to see or hear you, the student, demonstrate that you have indeed learned what I have been trying to teach you.

Since the student is the first user of the rubric, he/she is the first audience for it. The rubric is a guide for completing the task successfully. It should communicate enough specific information to define the task without squelching creativity in performing the task. A good rubric spawns a diverse collection of products which all meet the standards set down in the rubric. This latitude encourages students to express their individuality and saves the teacher from the mental fatigue of evaluating dozens of cookie-cutter products.

The second user of the rubric is the teacher. Although designing the rubric takes time up front, it can speed up the assessment process. Everything the teacher will need to look for is printed right there on the rubric. Circling and checking criteria on the rubric as the teacher finds it in the product doesn't take long. Underlining words and phrases to draw the student's attention is much faster than writing the same comments over and over on a set of submissions. The rubric also helps the teacher to control for positive or negative bias. (Even if Susie is the best student in the class, her product must still provide the required evidence of meeting the standards for this particular task. Just because Johnny's handwriting is difficult to read, if handwriting is not important enough in this assignment to be featured in the rubric, the teacher must look beyond the handwriting and only at the quality descriptors for the task.)

The third audience for the rubric is any member of that wider audience it has been pre-determined might read, view, or observe the products. It is necessary for this audience to see a blueprint especially for exemplary completion of the task. Depending on the type of rubric appropriate for the task, the audience could also benefit from seeing the descriptors of nearly successful and unsuccessful completion of the task. These categories might read on the rubric as: Exceeds Expectations, Meets Expectations, Approaches Expectations, and Does Not Meet Expectations (or Not Ready Yet). Since many of us (teachers and students) live in the world of 100%, a range of percentage grades might be assigned to each level of proficiency. This method serves the dual purpose of generating a grade for the gradebook and letting students know what they would need to do to be more successful (or raise their grade) on this or subsequent tasks.

An audience must know what it's looking for before it can tell if it has found it. This is an important function of the rubric as an authentic assessment.

ACTIVITY:

Within the next month, select a task you were going to assign anyway and devise a method for giving it an audience beyond yourself. (Maybe just the other students or a bulletin board in your room.) Try sketching out a checklist of ten criteria or less which would be present in an exemplary performance of the task. (Post this list on the bulletin board.) Distribute this list when you make the assignment, informing the students that they should use it to guide their work. Be prepared to reflect next time on your and student perceptions.