Assessing English 102 Discussion

Fall Dept Meeting

Nancy Chick & Holly Hassel

“The influencing of instructional practices has been served most powerfully by generic rubrics.”[1]

“Isn’t the primary purpose of assessment to promote learning, not simply measure it?”[2]

Goals & Benefits of Using A Good Rubric

For students and Instructors: 

·         Clarifying instructional goals or targets (most imp quals & concepts of good wr) – esp complex & hard-to-define ones such as writing – to instructor and to student

·         Increases consistency of evaluation across teacher, time, and assignment when rubrics created through mutual agreement of criteria for quality – increasing student and teacher confidence

·         By using clear, mutually agreed upon performance criteria that are clear, consistent, and defensible, the “objectivity” of assessment increases for constructed-response assignments like essays (c-r assignments require humans to evaluate, so “subjective” vs. selected-response assignments such as matching/multiple choice/true false, which can be evaluated by machine or scoring key because there’s a clear right/wrong and no middle ground, so “objective” – so rubrics clarify “right/wrong” by establishing & clarifying high/middle/low quality) 

For students:

·         Remove the mystery of what makes good writing

o        Enables sts to focus in practice b/c they know goals for writing and feel more in control

o        Empowers sts to self-assess and improve their own performance, esp when they are involved in using criteria for assessment  (ie, peer eval activities)

·         By helping students understand the nature of quality for performances and products, improve student motivation & achievement

·         When students use rubrics while writing and for self- and peer-assessment, rubrics enhance student learning -- integrating assessment and instruction

What is a Rubric?

A rubric is not a checklist

List of components that must be present

o        no evaluation of quality

o        ok for simple tasks but not when quality is relevant

A rubric is not a performance list

List of items to rate and rating scale

o        no detailed description of performance levels so not clear to students:  what does “excellent, good, poor coherence,” etc, mean?  What’s the difference between each?

A rubric is

Set of criteria used to evaluate a student's performance, made up of three parts: 

o        List of criteria for performance quality,

o        Different levels of performance, and

o        Descriptions of each level of performance (good = ___, fair = ___, weak = ___)

At best, a rubric is accompanied by examples (anchors) to illustrate the traits and different levels of performance.

Kinds of rubrics:  Holistic assessment vs. Analytical-trait assessment

Holistic assessing:     a single score based upon an overall impression of a product or performance

When to use:

o        when you need to show quick snapshot of overall achievement, rather than description of quality

o        good for speed scoring

o        good for simple products or performances

Disadvantages:

o        2 students can get same score for vastly different reasons

o        doesn’t clearly ID strengths or weaknesses

Analytical-trait             evaluates for selected traits, with each trait receiving a separate score/grade.

assessing:                  For example, a piece of writing may be evaluated according to content,

organization, sentence fluency, diction, and mechanics. Trait scores/grades may be weighted differently.

When to use:

o        when you need to describe quality

o        good for complex skills, products, performances for which several dimensions are needed to be clear

o        teaching students nature of quality, showing strengths & weaknesses in detail

o        providing detailed feedback to students

Disadvantages:

o        evaluating is slower

o        takes longer to learn

Kinds of rubrics:  Task-specific rubric vs. Generic rubric

Task-specific (different rubric for different papers)

·         Good to find out if sts know particular facts, equations, methods, procedures (ie, elemts of Modernism, sources of error in specific science experiment, using particular painting technique – particular content learning)

·         Preferred for scoring alone (shows quality only for one task), rather than generalized abilities across different tasks and assignments

·         Easier and faster for consistent scoring (big-scale assessments in which number is all that matters)

·         Task-specific rubrics not a good choice for complex tasks b/c they “give away” the answers or specific details and do the thinking for the students, rather than encourage students to generalize or transfer skill from one paper to next

Generic (one rubric for all papers)

·         Preferred for complex skills that students need to generalize across tasks

·         Good to teach nature of quality across similar tasks, allows sts to generalize about good writing and apply what they learn about quality from one task to other

·         More consistency between teachers b/c defines quality in complex performances & thus shows we’re all looking at writing in same way; makes them more reliable and objective (rather than having individual instructors create their own rubrics, authors recommend depts. collectively develop rubric to establish a “standard” set of criteria and perf levels)

Based on our research, we designed an analytical-trait, generic rubric for English 102.