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rubrics

Assessing and tracking blogs

By Bonni Stachowiak | January 20, 2015 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

I made the move a few years ago in my hybrid classes to stay mostly away from discussion forum posts. They tended to generate more of a transactional perception of the assignments.

Blogs seem to inspire people to do their best work, given the public nature of the assignments.

assessing and tracking blogs

Plus, if a person takes their blog seriously, they can be on their way to building a strong personal brand. Their data isn't locked behind an LMS, but is theirs to do with it what they want, after the class has ended.

Audrey Watters has been an advocate for providing students their their own online presence, one that isn't trapped in an LMS. On episode 18, she describes the University of Mary Washington's “A domain of one's own” initiative, in which they provide all incoming students their own website that gets transferred over to their ownership upon graduation.

Anyone who has made the switch from forums to blogs knows that it isn't anywhere near as efficient for the professor. You need to subscribe to all the students' blogs, manually, and commenting is nowhere near as easy as on an LMS.

The benefits far outweigh the challenges, though, so I continue to make use of blogging as an assignment in many of my courses.

Assessing blogs

The vast majority of the assignments in my courses are evaluated using a rubric. I've seen my fair share of atrocious blog rubrics and am continually striving to make mine better.

The best approach to assessment of blogs seems to be that they should be geared toward the learning outcomes for the course (as in that a generic blog rubric could not be used to adequately assess a blog).

This is a blog rubric that I've created for a doctoral course on leadership and technology in which the students develop a personal knowledge management (PKM) and use their blog as a means of sharing their work with others.

A new approach to tracking blogs

I use Feedly to subscribe to the cohort's blogs and then Newsify to actually read them. However, since the rubric calls for different types of posts each week, it is difficult for me to quantify them at the end of the term for grading purposes.

I wind up having to go back and manually count the students' posts to see if they blogged each week. It is also difficult because they don't always categorize their posts, according to the rubric, so I make my best effort to guess which type of post they were intending, a method that no doubt has its weaknesses.

Richard Byrne inspires

rbtweet

Relief came when I saw a Tweet from Richard Byrne about his approach to tracking blogs using a Google form.

I wish I would have implemented his approach over the summer and used it with my undergraduate students in the Fall. However, I didn't invest the time and wound up having both inefficiencies and needless student conflict without a more reliable means for tracking.

blogformsmMy Google form for tracking blog posts

I have modified Richard Byrne‘s approach slightly. Since my students are asked to write three posts per week, they have three places in which to paste their links.

Additionally, there is a place for them to indicate the type of post they are submitting. This should help steer the students toward the types of posts they're required to write each week, as well as making it easier for me to determine their intent.

I'm already excited about the time saving possibilities that this approach will provide.

It also seems like it will help reinforce the expectations for the students.

[reminder]Are you trying out any new approaches in your teaching this year to try to add some efficiencies into the grading process? [/reminder]

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: blog, grading, rubrics

Still questioning the effectiveness of rubrics?

By Bonni Stachowiak | June 17, 2014 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Ever since I first read the book Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback, and Promote Student Learning, I was hooked.

However, I am surrounded by colleagues who not only don't see value in them, but think they are a deterrent to teaching. Their concerns range from what I call the supreme court method of assessment (“I'll know it when I see it) to the “sink or swim” mentality that they say will help prepare our students for corporate life.

I see… If there are awful managers out there who don't communicate their expectations well, we should definitely employ their methods in our teaching process…

arrowpavement

 

It doesn't take long to find a poor quality rubric, which certainly contributes to the concerns about their validity. Grant Wiggins stresses the importance of having “intelligent versus thoughtless” rubrics. It takes time to craft a rubric that truly assessed learning and, over time, increases the quality of student work. A rubric should provide the means to assess quality in differing degrees. If what is being described is a binary characteristic (the student either included it, or didn't), the proper term is checklist, not rubric (Wiggins).

If you're reading this post and have attempted to use rubrics well, but still aren't sure you've capitalized on their benefits, this is the right place for you. Here are ways to get more out of rubrics by capturing, curating, and creating them:

[Read more…] about Still questioning the effectiveness of rubrics?

Filed Under: Teaching Tagged With: rubrics

Efficiency and effectiveness with rubrics

By Bonni Stachowiak | March 19, 2013 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

I'm the chair of our university's Faculty Development Committee. We recently conducted a survey of our faculty members, in part to discover what were perceived to be the most valuable breakout sessions to offer for our Fall 2013 faculty development kick-off.

As I reviewed all the responses, one theme emerged, in terms of what breakouts ranked highly. It was apparent that the majority of us feel the squeeze of wanting to accomplish more tasks in limited time. I plan on doing a series of posts about faculty personal productivity in the coming months. In this post, however, I start with one way to both save time and provide more meaningful feedback to students: creating and using rubrics.

GETTING STARTED

When I first began developing rubrics, I followed my Mom's tried-and-true method of finding a book on the topic. Stevens' and Levi's Introduction to Rubrics proved invaluable in establishing a process for speedy rubric creation.

rubricsI own the first edition of the book, though the current version appears to have gone through some important revisions since then. I highly recommend getting a copy of the book and discovering the steps of rubric creation. Having a framework to use each time you come up with a new rubric will ultimately be faster and will lead toward rubrics that are easier to comprehend.

You can also facilitate groups in developing rubrics, which can be helpful when teaching non-foundational courses and more advanced learners. Departments can also develop rubrics together for class and program assessment purposes. Introduction to Rubrics has a recommended process that facilitates rubric creation by both individuals and groups.

FINDING SAMPLES

While much of the content focuses on K-12 resources, Kathy Schrock's Assessment and Rubrics page (http://www.schrockguide.net/assessment-and-rubrics.html) is worth a visit. In particular, she has a section devoted to rubric builders and generators that is a big time saver. While it is possible to build a rubric that automatically calculates a point value as you select various parts of the rubric in Microsoft Word, it is by far a quick process and requires advanced word processing skills.

DePaul's Teaching Commons site also has a page (http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/Feedback_Grading/rubrics.html) devoted to rubrics that is great for finding samples. The top portion of the page has general rubric tools, while the bottom portion has samples for particular topics or skills.

I continually update my bookmarking site of choice (Pinboard.in) with new rubrics and related tools as I discover them (https://pinboard.in/u:bonni208/t:Rubrics/).

One recent site that was recommended by a list serve I am a member of was the Association of American Colleges and Universities' LEAP program. They have established a set of essential learning outcomes and related rubrics for twenty-first-century college students, as a part of their Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) campaign (http://www.aacu.org/leap/vision.cfm).

REFINING RUBRICS OVER TIME

My husband recently wrote a post that emphasized the use of the question “Is good enough best for this?” (http://coachingforleaders.com/articles/be-more-flexible/) as a means for being more flexible in life. I have found that with rubrics, it is always better to have one published, than to wait until I have refined it well enough to consider it done. My class preparation checklist has an item to evaluate and, if needed, modify the rubrics for a given course each semester.

When I am in the process of grading assignments for a given course, I make note of any gaps that exist in the students' submissions that were not addressed in the rubric's construction. Then, I create an entry in my task management system to revise that rubric once the semester is over.

SHARING YOUR CREATIONS WITH OTHERS

Once you have come up with a set of rubrics that are working well for you, why not share them with others in your field? Consider generating a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/) for your work, so you can comfortably share it in a way that is acceptable to you.

Please feel free to post links to rubrics you have created in the comments section, or to pass on other rubric tools that have benefitted you.

Filed Under: Teaching Tagged With: grading, rubrics, teaching

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