Thoughts from 7/26

Today's class continued our work on assessment and brought us into the world of rubrics. We reviewed several online resources for rubric creation. It is so helpful to not have to start from scratch, but rather modify a rubric that someone else has created. Rubrics allow students to have the ability to see the expectations prior to beginning an assignment. This is critical in a long term assignment or one with multiple parts. They can see the point values and determine those pieces which are the most critical.

Rubrics also allow the teacher to be more transparent with grading. It takes away from some of the subjectivity that can plague the grading procedure. It also gives parents greater clarity and justification for their child's grades.

Some of the resources that can be found online are:
University of Wisconsin's site on educational rubrics: http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/rubrics.shtml

A Rubric on an Inspiration created graphic organizer:
http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/inspirationrubric.html

A Generic Rubric Generator:
http://teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/general/

Guidelines for Rubric Development:
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/triton/july/rubrics/Rubric_Guidelines.html

Our last mission of the class was to create our own rubric for the unit assignment. It took us a long time, but the end result was a comprehensive rubric that had point values and categories of quality for all of the pieces of the assignment. It can be viewed on myLesley.