Good Assessments and Reliable Rubrics

I was intrigued to learn about Performance Assessments on the website we looked at for this week’s class. Though the pages of the website I looked at did not go into a justification for the superiority of Performance Assessments over standard multiple-choice type assessments, it didn’t take much to convince me. Multiple-choice assessments implicitly encourage “cramming,” or intense studying by way of rote memorization for a short period of time before the assessment, because information can be crammed and remembered for the purposes of recall in this method. After all, multiple-choice questions actually give students the answer; it is simply located among other possible responses. So, all someone needs is for their memory to be jogged to push them in the direction of the right answer – the one already provided for them. This is different from being able to write the content of the correct responses to these questions without in one’s own words without choosing from possible responses. Any student will tell you that the latter is more difficult. This is the case, however, because it requires a deeper, more integrated sort of knowledge – the sort that we should earnestly desire our students to attain.

I still remember the circumstances of the final exam in my freshman biology class. I was given a study guide that contained all of and only the questions that would be on the test; all I needed to do was remember what was on that sheet. I memorized it, got an A for my effort, and quickly forgot all of the material.

Contrast this with my Science for Elementary Teachers (SME 301) class last semester. The tests had mostly open-ended essay questions, like “explain the changes that occur in a melting ice cube on both a substance and molecular level.” Even later in the semester, when we were done with learning about changes of state, questions would be asked that would draw on this knowledge. Though the essay format was a bit scary at first, I had a fair opportunity of knowing what was expected in my answer: in the class prior to our essays, we would develop the rubric as a class for what knowledge would be tested.

As the Performance Assessment website indicates, having a rubric in SME made the essay scoring process fair and sound. We as students knew how to evaluate our own work. I even believe that a competent individual unfamiliar with the material could have used the rubric to score and produce very similar results as our professor. Thus, the website would call this a good assessment with a highly reliable scoring rubric. Being able to have a hand in the rubric’s development as a class gave me as the student a feeling of responsibility of learning the material. And this learning could only focus on getting a deep, integrated understanding of the material, since I would have to write about it using my own words and my own structure of understanding, and would have to hang on to that knowledge for the whole semester. As a result, I could still tell you a lot about what happens when an ice cube melts!

I must admit: before checking out this website, I thought I would be developing scores and scores of multiple-choice questions in my years as a teacher. My mind is now changed. I realize the great benefit to students’ learning of questions and tasks that are more open-ended. To evaluate these tasks, I realize that a scoring rubric that is made clear to students and that makes grading into simply applying the rubric is critical. The only thing I am missing is some practice in creating such activities and their corresponding rubrics. When do you (the reader of this blog) think I will have such an opportunity?