Develop Your Staff
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Develop Your Staff Archive >
Professional development activities that have proven effective will be included in Develop Your Staff. Your contributions are welcome. Send them to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Rubric-Based Assessment. Part 1: Prepare Yourself
Rubrics are a tool to provide students with specific learning targets. They assess student learning along a continuum from nonmastery to superior performance.
Rubrics allow the teacher to define specific criteria along with levels of mastery for each and to show students exactly where they are in terms of mastering the concept.
How Rubrics Work
- Rubrics force us to think and write out the learning objectives FIRST, providing a common language for students and teachers to use.
- Rubrics give students an incentive to improve. Unlike grades, they give clear information on where to improve and what quality work will look like.
- Rubrics promote lifelong learning skills, such as standards for complex thinking and effective communication.
- Rubrics are used to score 100% of Writing Proficiency tests and nearly 50% of the other Proficiency tests.
Why Teachers Like Them
As one teacher reports, “Our students’ scores on the Sixth-Grade Science Proficiency test improved 12% over last year.
I do not believe it is due to ‘teaching to the test’ but to improving the way students think and write about science for regular classroom assignments.”
Recommended Reading
These articles will help you facilitate the learning, and they’re short enough to copy for the workshop packet:
Goodrich, H. (1997). Understanding rubrics. Educational Leadership, 54, 14-17.
Jarrell, C. (1999). From teachers who know: assessment for maximum teaching and learning. Ohio ASCD Journal, 2, 7-12.
Wiggins, G. (1992). Creating tests worth taking. Educational Leadership, 49, 26-31.
Part 2: Deliver the Workshop >.
