Assessment for Teaching

Learning Objectives

In this chapter you will learn to:

Usually rubrics are represented as a form of a rating scale, which often fails to help teachers improve student performance or product. This chapter presents a new approach to writing rubrics that fits within the developmental assessment framework described in Chapter 3. We will explore why some forms of rubrics fail to help teachers and we will examine an approach to the evaluation of rubrics. Several case studies and examples are presented as a rationale for writing rubrics. The focus of the approach is on how rubrics and judgement-based assessment can help teachers to improve student performance.

Introduction

Teachers using judgement-based assessment must operate using a criterion-referenced framework to interpret the quality of student work. To do this, they need rubrics – or rules – to guide their judgements. The term ‘rubric’, however, is much overused and misunderstood.

Websites are available providing sets of rubrics for almost every conceivable area of learning, but much of what they offer is unhelpful and some of it is wrong. Although some of the rubrics offered on those sites are useful, almost none is underpinned by a model of measurement and very few appear to be underpinned by a learning theory. One of the first things we need to do when considering rubrics is to have criteria for evaluating them. Then we need to know how to write our own rubrics in such a way that they are useful and of high quality, with minimal risk of misleading students, teachers, parents or collaborative teaching team (CTT) members. Rubrics written and interpreted in a criterion-referenced framework are generally underpinned by both a model of measurement and a learning theory or taxonomy. This chapter describes how to write rubrics within such a framework.