Content Quality
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
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This free learning activity helps novice or experienced educators apply performance assessment concepts to create a skills-based performance assessment rubric aligned with a learning objective and associated with an appropriately aligned task. The learning material consists of five downloadable PDFs accessed through a Google Docs coversheet shared via an online repository. The material includes two levels of assignment instructions. One set is suitable for learners familiar with the underlying assessment concepts. The other is scaffolded for learners new to the underlying concepts or inexperienced with using or creating skills-based assessment tools, such as rubrics. In addition, the learning activity and material are suitable for use as an individual or group activity for undergraduate or graduate education courses and professional development training and workshop experiences.
The selected response strategy limits the options for novices and provides scaffolds within the limitations. The activity can be completed by individuals or small collaborative groups. The activity cards and instructions (as well as the answer key) can be provided to learners electronically to be completed online or the activity cards can be printed and completed in a face-to-face learning environment. The advantage of the printed cards is that learners can easily manipulate the cards and the instructor can quickly assess learners’ progress by visually looking at the colored cards selected.
Workshop and Training Material
The material is suitable for a collaborative group learning activity either in-class or as an outside team project,
Assign to individuals as a supplementary homework activity.
Use as a Professional development activity either individually or in small groups as part of a workshop on assessing student learning or developing quality rubrics and learning activities aligned with the course and institutional learning objectives and student outcomes.
Use as self-directed professional development learning activities as part of a larger training module on assessing student learning or developing quality rubrics and learning activities aligned with the course and institutional learning objectives and student outcomes.
The material can be used with in-service teachers as well as with pre-service teachers. Anyone involved in teaching would highly benefit from this resource.
Reliable internet connection and any type of browser; PDF viewer.
Learners can create an assessment rubric aligned with a specific learning objective that includes multiple criteria and benchmarks.
Learners can select an appropriate assignment task based on alignment with a specific learning objective and whether it meets the quality characteristics of being generalizable, authentic, multiple skill-focused, teachable, fair, feasible, and scoreable.
Education Discipline: College Lower Division, College Upper Division, Graduate School,
Post-graduate professional development workshops and training activities: educators, course developers, designers, educational assessment professionals
Workshop activity for faculty and staff preparing to participate in institutional assessment projects.
Learners need familiarity with several general knowledge concepts related to educational assessment theories and methods:
The material provides an authentic learning activity that walks users through the steps to create an appropriate skills-based assessment rubric aligned with a specific learning objective. The activity then allows users to analyze several assessment tasks and choose the task that best aligns with both the learning objective and the rubric assessment criteria.
Learning objectives can easily be constructed with the use of this material. Any person interested in pedagogical procedures and specifically interested in how to design assessment will highly benefit.
Specialists in teaching assessment will make adjustment to the information in this resource.
The material does not provide references for the disciplinary concepts underlying the activity.
The lack of supplementary references or links to underlying concept material affects the ability of students to integrate the learning material with prior knowledge and experience fully.
The last paragraph of the Directions state in part, “Review the text, Google performance assessments. . .” but there was no link to a separate document with that title nor a heading or subheading on the “Directions” PDF that explicitly matched that text title.
The activity represents an authentic experiential learning experience that students may face as educators when they are presented with pre-defined learning objectives and learning tasks but not provided with related performance assessment tools.
The learning activity allows students to learn and apply the basic skills needed to create performance assessment rubrics aligned with a specific learning objective within an hour or two of focused activity and follow-up.
After using this material, students are expected to design coherent assessment products. The material can be used when the students study different ways to assess students and the tools they can use to objectively assess their products.
The material does not include explicit learning objectives or model an activity scoring rubric aligned with an explicit learning objective for self-assessment.
The material does not explicitly identify the intended prerequisite knowledge.
The material relies on concepts not mentioned in the included definition of “performance assessment.”
The material does not include linked resources or materials supporting the characteristic associated with “a good assessment,” as presented in the answer key.
The definition of “a good assessment” does not mention or discuss the critical connection between a learning objective, the rubric, and the task.
The Answer Key does not demonstrate or reinforce the relationship between the “best rubric” design answer and learning objective (first activity step), between the “best rubric” answer and the “best task” answer (second activity step), or between the ”best task” answer and the learning objective.
Potential learners and instructors can access all learning materials in one place.
Instructors can adapt the material to various online or traditional teaching modalities with relative ease.
Instructors can easily adapt the material to individual, small groups, or other collaborative learning groups and situations.
The material is located in a google drive document. Users will find all the necessary details of what users will be doing with each piece of information. In the same document, users will find the different links to proceed with the implications of creating a performance assessment task. Users can go back and forth to the source page containing all the details and links.
The Answer Key format, organization, and content could confuse learners without access to a facilitator. For example, since the first task is creating a rubric aligned with the learning objective, the created rubric needs to be the first item discussed. Since the activity requires the task to be aligned with the rubric and objective, the “answers” need to relate the “best task” choice to the “best rubric” design.
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