Third lesson (Sep 27th)

In today's class, we talked about the creation of a rubric to assess our own participation on the course. Wouldn't it be interesting to do this with high school students? I think that getting students engaged in the creation of the rubric you will use makes them feel the assessment is 'fair' so I'd like to give it a try. 

The author of this article refers to rubrics as motivational tools, and suggests that students who participate in the creation of rubrics feel more empowered,  more intrinsically motivated, and understand better how to reach the expectations set upon them for the task.

Similarly, Liz Prather on her article The Power of Student Built Rubrics points out that after years of being assessed with tools designed by someone else (by teachers), students lose their intrinsic sense of quality, which eventually affects their autonomy as learners.
After starting a project for her students to create rubrics, Liz asked them to reflect on the process, and these are some of the things they said:

• Some rubrics may be set up to give certain pieces better grades even if they really aren’t.  A piece could get a higher grade, even if it’s not a better piece.

I absolutely agree with this student, I think that is one of the most challenging aspects of rubric construction. In the first place, teachers (and students if they are getting involved) need to pay close attention to the coherence between what they want to assess and what their rubrics are actually assessing. Secondly, rubrics must be assessed to make sure that the grade they provide actually reflects what's on the labels and descriptors because, as the student pointed out, a piece of writing could get a high grade without being particularly good if the criteria in the rubric is poorly written.

• I liked it because I’m setting goals for myself. I can only go as low as I’ll let myself go and as high as I let myself go. Plus, since I made the rubric, I’ll care about it more. It made me be very thorough about what I wanted to achieve.

 This is something I've been thinking about. As mentioned above, rubrics can be a great motivational tool and I think that what the student pointed out--about setting personal goals--is essential in language learning because it motivates you in the long term; in that sense, the objective of a certain task is reaching a particular goal you established instead of going for the immediate reward that could, for instance, be represented as a grade.

My only concern with student-created rubrics, is that (according to what we're experiencing in the course) it is very hard to get everyone involved. In the end, very few do participate in the creation of the rubric so the benefits aforementioned are only enjoyed for a few.