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Saturday, May 15, 2010

Two rubrics I have created_First trial

Assessment is an essential part in teaching. We simply can not go on teaching without assessing because we need to evaluate continuously what the learners have learned and the efficiency of our methods and techniques. Designing rubrics is one tool. These facilitate the job for the teacher to give clear instructions; and the learners have a clear image of they are supposed to do. Rubrics maximize participation as they push the students do their best to respond to the requirements in order to get the best grade. The tool could also be considered as an opportunity for self evaluation. Using rubrics, the students would evaluate their works and recognise their strengths and weaknesses in their productions.

I have designed two rubrics. Last week, I created a webQuest which needed rubrics. In this activity, the learners are asked to do a project based on the webquest where they get the opportunity to learn about countries where English is spoken as the first or the second language. I have had the opportunity then to make them.

The objective of the webQuest is as follows:

Using a webquest, elementary students will explore, observe webpages to do their projects in which they will learn about English language and English speaking countries around the world.

The second rubrics are about a writing task. The students have to write an informal letter to a friend in an English speaking country about their eating habits. They have to respect both form and content. Therefore, the rubrics focus on these as grading is based on format, salutation and closing, ideas, sentences and paragraphs.

The objective of the activity is as follows: Given a topic which the students have already explored in unit: “Food & Drink”, elementary students will talk about their eating habits and what food and drink they like and don’t like in an informal letter to a friend.

3 comments:

  1. Dear Hamid.
    Indeed ribrics are the guidance for our students what to do and the rubric generator sites are the guidance for teachers how to design rubrics and what to include there.
    Last week when we made our webquests and should create a rubric to evaluate students I faced difficulties regarding what criteria to include .
    But syiduing more attentively this week on rubrics I following the hinta they provide for each activity I found www.rubistar. org and http://teach-nology.com very helpful for me as a teacher - evaluator.

    And thank you for your suggestions in my blog.

    Bests,
    Nilufar

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  2. Dear Hamid,

    that's true, an important part in our job is to assess our students, to see how much they know, where the problems persist, what we can do. And the rubrics are really helpful, both for us and our students. We know what to evaluate, they know what it's expected from them. I have already said that sometimes we hear students "But I did a wonderful work! Why have I got only "satisfactory?" If they know what we want from them, we avoid hearing such things.

    Good work with your rubrics.

    All the best,
    Nadina

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  3. Dear Nilufar and Nadinne,
    Thank you for the comments. The way we assess our students is always put into question: How objective are we in grading our students work? Designing rubrics and sharing them with our learners, I see, is a kind of contract between us as teachers and our students. They c learly know what they should do because rubrics are also an orientation and they can grade themselves too. If the rubrics are interactive, the job is more facilitaed for both of us; teachers and students.
    Yours,
    Hamid.

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