Authentic Assessment and Rubrics

1. Authentic Assessmentand Rubrics with Angela Stephens 

2. What is Authentic Assessment? A form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills Jon Mueller Professor of Psychology, North Central College, Naperville, IL

3. Basic Elements of Authentic Assessment • Requires students to develop responses rather than select from predetermined options • Elicits higher order thinking in addition to basic skills • Directly evaluates holistic projects • Synthesizes with classroom instruction • Uses samples of student work (portfolios) collected over an extended time period • Stems from clear criteria made known to students (rubrics) • Allows for the possibility of multiple human judgments • Relates more closely to classroom learning • Teaches students to evaluate their own work

4. Traditional vs. Authentic Assessment Traditional --------------------------------------------- Authentic Selecting a Response ----------------------- Performing a Task Contrived ------------------------------------------------- Real-life Recall/Recognition -------------------- Construction/Application Teacher-structured --------------------------- Student-structured Indirect Evidence --------------------------------- Direct Evidence

5. What does Authentic Assessment look like? An authentic assessment usually includes a task for students to perform and a rubric by which their performance on the task will be evaluated.

6. Examples

7. How do you create Authentic Assessments? • Identify your standards for your students. • For a particular standard or set of standards, develop a task your students could perform that would indicate that they have met these standards. • Identify the characteristics of good performance on that task, the criteria, that, if present in your students’ work, will indicate that they have performed well on the task and have met the standards. • For each criterion, identify two or more levels of performance along which students can perform which will sufficiently discriminate among student performance for that criterion. The combination of the criteria and the levels of performance for each criterion will be your rubric for that task (assessment).

8. Your turn… Get with a partner or small group and brainstorm a few authentic assessments you could implement in your classes and then choose someone from your group to share two of them with the whole group. 10-15 minutes

9. Assessing the Assessment What is a rubric? A scoring scale used to assess student performance along a task-specific set of criteria

10. How do you make a rubric? Microsoft Excel Microsoft Word http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php

11. More info about rubrics… • Share rubric with students when you give assignments. • Let students practice grading their own assignments and classmates assignments using rubrics. • Model how to use rubrics with students. • Let students help create the criteria for rubrics.

12. Works Cited and Sources • http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/index.htm • http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/assess.shtml • http://www.funderstanding.com/authentic_assessment.cfm • http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php • http://intranet.cps.k12.il.us/Assessments/Ideas_and_Rubrics/Rubric_Bank/rubric_bank.html

13. Time out • Questions? • Use the remaining time to work on an authentic assessment or the creation of a rubric.