Rubric reflection from Su

A rubric is” a detailed scoring guide for assessment, based on stated criteria” (Shelly, Gunter, & Gunter, p. 396). A rubric is a guide for students and teachers, clarifying the criteria on which students’ work will be judged. A rubric helps teachers grade accurately, fairly and reliably. Teachers can increase the quality of the instruction by providing focus, emphasis, and attention to particular details to direct student learning. Rubrics can reduce the time spent grading by reducing uncertainty. Students are able to self-assess their own work prior to submitting it and improve performance. When assignments are scored and returned with the rubric, students can easily recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their work. On the other hand, there are also some disadvantages using a rubric. Rubrics may limit imagination if students feel compelled to complete the assignment strictly as outlined in the rubric instead of taking the initiative to explore their learning. Rubrics let students become test mastery rather than skill mastery. If the criteria of the rubric are too complex, it could lead to anxiety.

This week I created an analytic rubric for my digital storytelling project using iRubric. The iRubric is user friendly and easy to add, delete, and move criteria. First I wrote down all of the things that I felt were important and chose the most important ones as the categories, such as: theme, sequence, images, soundtrack, storyboard and collaboration. I had 6 criteria and 4 levels for each criteria, excellent, good, fair and poor. Please take a look at my rubric below and feel free to add any comment. Because this project is designed to develop students the creativity, I emphasize originality and creativity. Storyboard is important for planning the story so I add the storyboard as one of the criteria. I think that the hardest part of creating a rubric is to make the descriptions are specific, understandable and easy to follow. Even tough the rubric is time-consuming, it’s really worthy designing it.
Please take a look at my rubric and feel free to add any comment. Thanks.

References:

Mueller, J. (2010). Authentic Assessment Toolbox: Rubrics. Retrieved April 10, 2010 from http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/rubrics.htm#versus

Shelly, G., Gunter, G., & Gunter, R. (2010). Integrating Technology and Classroom Media in the Classroom. Boston: Course Technology.

Su