Two sides of the same coin: authentic assessment

Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2006 by Berg, Steven L

Berg: Later today, 1 will spend about 20 minutes presenting research strategies on how students can find certain types of material. Then, I am going to ask them to find those materials in the library. The assessment at the end of the class period is whether or not they have a printout in their hands. Would that be authentic assessment?

Mueller: Yes it would. Is that a real world task for them to find useful, relevant information? Yes it is.

Berg: It is also immediate. If a student did not understand what I was trying to teach or if I taught the lesson poorly, that will surface because the student will not be able to do the task.

Mueller: Definitely. Again, that is a nice distinction between traditional and authentic. If a student gets a multiple choice question wrong, you have little idea of why the student circled the wrong answer. Even if they circle the right answer, you have little idea of how they arrived at it. What does it mean about what they really know? It is hard to tell. But if students write a simple paragraph in response to some prompt, you can get a much better idea about what they are thinking. You can more easily identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Berg: What is the value of using a rubric?

Mueller: A rubric is a scoring scale in which you first identify the characteristics of good performance on a task. Those are called the criteria. So if you are going to ask students to write a persuasive essay, you ask "What are the characteristics of a good persuasive essay?" Those become the criteria; those are the things on which you are going to judge the paper. That is obviously subjective. So to make the subjective judgment more objective and consistent and reliable, you need to articulate what are the possible levels of performance for each of those criteria. A rubric contains those two elements: a set of criteria and the levels of performance for each criterion.

Berg: A colleague was telling me that he was using a writing rubric to give feedback to his students. He has found that when students get feedback on the rubric, he no longer gets questions such as "Why was this a 'C' paper?" The questions are more, "Why didn't you think my introduction was strong?" This has made a better learning process for the class.

Mulleer: Exactly. That illustrates another value of the rubric. All of us have been in classes where we got back a grade that we didn't quite understand. We went up to the teacher and asked "Why did you give me a 'C'?" The teacher says "You didn't do this and this and this" and you wonder "Why didn't you tell me ahead of time that I had to do this and this and this?" That is what teachers do with rubrics. They don't typically just use the rubric to evaluate work once it comes in; they show the rubric to the student even before they begin the work so that the students know what the teacher is looking for. By sharing the rubric, students know the criteria; know what the requirements of good performance on the task are. You communicate the rubric clearly at the beginning of the process and you use the language consistently when the students are doing the work. Then when you evaluate the work, you use the same language and criteria you told the students you would be looking for at the beginning. Using rubrics creates more consistency of language and judgment throughout the process.