Rubric…Activity Reflection #7

This week for my graduate class we were to create a rubric to evaluate our students digital stories projects.  According to Craig Mertler from Bowling Green State University, rubrics are “rating scales as opposed to checklists- that are used with performance assessments. ”  Before I could even start creating my rubric, I had to decide which type of rubric I would like to create between an analytic rubric and a holistic rubric. Mertler stated that holistic rubrics allow teachers to grade a project as a whole whereas an analytic rubric allows teachers to grade individual parts of the project separately.  He also suggested that if there are only a few correct answers to a project he feels that the analytic rubric is more appropriate to assess the students and the opposite is true for holistic rubrics.  I choose to go with an analytic rubric for my students project because there are so many separate components that I feel is important to grade.  I spent a lot of this week contemplating what percentages would be appropriate for the mathematics content and how much of the percentages would be appropriate for the technology that the students use for their project.  At our school we have a separate elective class that teaches our students how to use technology and I do not know how much as a math teacher I should focus on grading them on how well they use the technology in their project when they have the opportunity in their elective to learn about technology.  Understandable, coming from a teacher that is getting my masters in Educational Technology, I feel it is important for all teachers to integrate technology in some way into their classroom, but I am not sure how much emphasis to put on the technology when I am expected to teach math.  But, then I looked at it from the perspective of one subject area to another.  Every teacher at our school is required to integrate reading into the subject matter that they teach.  In my opinion, integrating technology is just as crucial as integrating other core subjects areas into my math curriculum.

The two rubrics that I relied on to put together my own rubric was from University of Wisconsin – Stout and the NCSU Multimedia Mania Project Rubric.  I felt that these two rubrics did an amazing job of defining different descriptors that will help me as a teacher decide what category each student falls into for each criteria in the rubric.

I decided to use iRubric to create my rubric for the Golden Ratio project.  This program was very easy to follow and I felt that the tutorial videos were short and very informative.  I liked that I could preview my rubric and see how a student would get a grade by clicking on the different levels of achievement for each criteria.  I had a little trouble embedding the rubric into the PBworks page I created.  I figured out how to do this, but I still have questions on how I can actually score each student’s project using iRubric.  I think I have to actually set up a class within iRubric.  I feel that before I actually use the rubric I created I need to do a little more research on this program before I turn in my final project for my graduate course.

Here is the links to the rubric I created.

You are also able to view it within my Curriculum page at: Rubric or 
Glogster and click on Step 4 - Evaluation & Rubric


or



Resources:
Mertler, Craig A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom.  Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(25).  Retrieved April 13, 2011 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25.


Rubrics:
University of Wisconsin -Stout http://www2.uwstout.edu/content/profdev/rubrics/pptrubric.html
NCSU Multimedia Mania Project Rubric
http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink/rub.mm.st.pdf