Rubrics round every corner
Just when you thought you were catching up with all the jargon to do with assessment and web portfolios, along comes another term to send you scurrying for the dictionary – Rubric.
This term has only relatively recently scrambled out of the Christian churches and insinuated itself into educational circles, however, it was only a matter of time before Rubrics were being touted all over the web.
A rubric is a set of rules of conduct or procedure, and especially referred to conduct or procedure for a Christian service. It has a secondary meaning to do with titles of a book, but its primary meaning has much more application to online assessment and web portfolios. Basically it now means a set of procedures or standards by which a piece of work is judged. It can also set a standard for observed activity, such as “samples show student knowledge of netiquette” or “participated several times a week in the eForum”.
Within New Zealand’s Qualification Framework an Element and its related PCs form a “rubric”. The rubric starts with a clearly defined skill that needs to be demonstrated as learned and/or internalized and then defines the standard that will demonstrate whether that standard has been exceeded, met or has not been met.
A Rubric is written to reflect a certain agreed outcome for a specific assignment. Each class assignment, topic or training session would have a different Rubric with different skills and standards that would demonstrate the level of skill the learner has achieved. Rubrics can be applied across many groups (in much the same way Elements and PCs are supposed to work) to standardize the way different teachers might judge achievement; or they can be applied to work compared between one year’s cohort and the next year’s intake.
The point of real difference is that, unlike NZQA Unit Standards, Rubrics can be written for individuals choosing individual tasks for an assignment. They can be agreed between teacher and learner prior to learning starting. The learner can:
# Define what skills they most want to learn from being in a course.
# Decide on a task that will best demonstrate those skills.
# Work with the teacher to identify what will be an acceptable standard.
The value of such a process is to get buy-in from the learner. Before they start on anything they will have a clear idea on what is the minimum standard they can achieve and how the task they assign themselves will allow them to achieve it. They’re engaged in defining the learning process. The teacher, however, is in for a lot more work prior to a course as they will most likely need to guide the learner toward defining the parameters of the project in order to give learner enough opportunity to demonstrate their skills.
Want to learn more? Then try this site: Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators
Posted by Heather Absalom-Smith at August 17, 2005 02:10 PM
