When we assess the students at my school, most of the time, we do not make use of any 'rubric' although there are rubrics at our disposal for each level that we teach. We only make use of these when we are marking the scripts for a test or the final year exams. In most cases, many teachers feel that making use of a rubric while correcting is demanding in terms of time and imagine the number of copies we have to correct each week.
Yet, after reading some literature on rubrics and having submitted a task on the topic, I do believe that it is of utmost importance to make use of this in order for us teachers to move towards standardization and fairness. Using a rubric will not only be advantageous to the teacher but to his students as well. Since the rubric explicitly presents the expectations for a task, the teacher ensures himself that his grading standard does not change over time. I think that we wrongly believe that using a rubric while correcting makes the correction exercise become lengthy. On the contrary, making use of a rubric can help the teacher to get rid of uncertainties while correcting and thus he can move along at a quicker pace with the task. Moreover, when there are many teachers involved in the correction exercise, a rubric maintains consistency and all the teachers move along the same line of thought.
A rubric is of great benefit to the students too as they are made aware of what is required of them and they do not attempt a task blindly. The rubric helps them to plan their work properly as they know what is expected of them. Later the students will make use of the same rubric to think about their strengths and weaknesses. Undoubtedly, we need to know where we are heading to. We must not teach by trial and error as we have the future of so many students in our hands.Sources:
http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/rubrics.html
http://help.rcampus.com/index.php/Benefits_of_rubrics
Hello Jennifer,
ReplyDeleteThis Fall 2013 has taught us sweet and serious lesson about the 21st century's teaching, learning and evaluation with technology. No doubt, PBL and rubrics are useful for both teacher and student. Rubrics are clear-cut guidelines of teachers and give justice to the students avoiding impartiality while correcting students' performance.
Best
Tika
Hello Jennifer!
ReplyDeleteI have recently started believing that rubrics are really important tools for assessment, more so in PBL. I agree that we should not teach by trial and error method. Moreover, students must know what is expected from them in a particular task or assignment.
Best!
Darshan