A simulation in creating rubrics to assess and evaluate a specific activity.

Background information

You are a fifth grade teacher that has been working with the Wayne State Park Department. You have taken your students to a nearby park to study it and have had the Park Director visit your classroom to answer students' questions. Through these interactions the Park Director has offered to provide opportunities for student involvement and you wrote, submitted and received a service learning grant.

Before deciding to participate in these events you reflected on the opportunities that would be available for your students and what they could learn from their participation. Your initial reflection was a fairly quick decision to participate.

Later you reflected on what science concepts, generalizations, and skills students might learn and develop and identified several.

Science concepts and generalizations identified

After several activities, some of which included, using the fish of Nebraska materials available from the Nebraska Games and Park Commission in Gretna, NE to identify and classify pictures of fish, trips to the park to measure the depth of the pond and identify different plants and animals, and help the park transfer fish. See the newspaper clipping for more information.

Newspaper report of fishing trip

Your plan was to use initial activities with the fish of Nebraska materials as exploration, a few more activities for invention and the fish moving activity as the last invention activity or first expansion. You now believe it's time for a short written assessment and created a task.

Assessment task

As your created the task you used an assessment task rubric to guide you.

Assessment task rubric

Feeling the task was appropriate to collect assessment information about the concepts/generalizations and skills that you want to assess you administered it to your students. The following is a representative sampling.

Student's Work
student 1	student 2	student 3	student 4	student 5	student 6
student 7	student 8	student 9	student 10	student 11	student 12
student 13

Task

Decide how to interpret the results and what to report to students and parents. Some parents desire specific information about what and how their child is doing and there are those that believe they they can only tell how their child is doing with a grade. It has been common practice in your school to use rubrics to provide specific information and rate the students' work by assigning a grade.

Create a rubric to assess the concepts/generalizations/skills that you identified earlier and assign a grade. The following rubric can be used as a guide.

Assessment rubric for your rubric

Suggestions

Use a three pile sort. Sort the papers into three levels (well done, okay, not okay).

Use the concepts, generalizations, skills to decide what categories you want on the rubric click for suggestions

Create a rubric. Review it with the assessment rubric rubric.

Use it on one paper from each pile. Adjust the rubric as desired.

Create a grading scale.

Correct the rest of the papers.

Decide if you were consistent for all papers. One way is to go back and review the first couple of papers that you did and see if you changed the way they were rated. If you are not satisfied that equity was provided, make necessary adjustments to do so.

Reflection

Reflect on the process and write a short summary of what you discovered.

Further considerations:

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of creating a rubric before or after the task?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of creating performance criteria without student involvement?
3. How did your ratings compare to others?
4. What does this suggest?
5. How did you benefit from doing this activity?

Robert Sweetland's Notes ©