I'm glad this project is coming to the end. Designing it has been such an experience of learning and now I'm ready to overcome the last part which is the assessment.
Assessment refers to the process of documenting the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs. And it can be divided into two types of assessment: summative and formative.
On the one hand, summative assessment is useful to know what learners have achieved in a specific time. In fact, it is also called assessment of learning.
On the other hand, formative assessment is continuous and it is assessment for learning. This means that formative assessment intends to help the teacher to understand how much and how well the students are learning the contents. It provides a feedback that might suggest the teacher changing or adapting his or her teaching practices, materials or tasks for the future.
When it comes to assessing in CLIL approaches, we find a dilemma which is: What do we assess? Content? Language? Both?
Well, we have to assess content and language, and additionally, communication skills, cognitive skills and attitudes towards learning.
Having said that, the first thing is to decide on the assessment criteria we are going to use to evaluate the students learning. This requires to have clear what we are going to assess in our students.
In my OEP about The Weather, the assessment criteria will be the following one:
The student...
- Describes the weather including specific data about temperatures, wind, precipitation and pressure
- Gives weather reports
- Explains the causes of at least two atmospheric phenomena
- Identifies and uses different tools to record information about the weather
- Identifies and compares the weather changes across the seasons
- Is able to read, interpret and create weather maps
- Is able to work autonomously
As far as the assessment tools are concerned, I'm going to use rubrics.
According to Heidi Andrade, a rubric is "a document that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing the criteria, or what counts, and describing levels of quality from excellent to poor".
A like rubrics because apart from grading, they give feedback which in my opinion is the most important part of assessment. Another important thing is that through rubrics we provide the students with the expectations we have about their work in advance, so they can act taking that into account.
Now, I'd like to share with you the four elements that a good rubric should contain.
Now, before going deeply into the rubric creation, I have to tell you that I've decided to make 3 rubrics. One which can serve as a template to assess every learning mission, another one to assess the whole project, and finally one more adapted to second graders' language, in other words, easier to understand.
Having this clear, the first step I'm going to take to create my own rubrics is to draft them. The rubrics for assessing missions will follow the same pattern since the criteria aspects are going to be the same for all of them:
- Instructions
- Deadlines
- Final outcome
- Group work
- Skills
- Language
As for the grades, I've decided to use four that go progressively from Below average (0 points) to Excellent (3 points). The reason is that in this way, I ensure that even the students who try it but still have difficulties have some kind of reward.
Now that the criteria and the grades are clear, it's time to hands on creating the first one.
I've chosen iRubric from the following list of assessment tools basically because I've found it easy to use. And here you have the result:
This is the rubric to assess learning missions.
The following one is the project's assessing rubric and I have decided to use a different tool just for the shake of trying a different one: Quick Rubric
This rubric seems to be more complicated since the criteria, mentioned at the beginning of this post, is more varied and precise. I'm going to start by making them simpler without losing important information:
- Descriptions of the weather
- Understanding of atmospheric phenomena's causes
- Collection of atmospheric data through different tools
- Differentiation of weather changes across the seasons
- Ability to read and create weather maps
Some of them might have been already measured with the learning mission's rubric. However, students may improve their knowledge and skills throughout the project making it necessary to measure the contents again at the end.
The grades this time will be three: beginning, emerging and achieved since I really need to know if the objectives have been accomplished or not.
Bearing this in mind, I've created the following rubric:
The weather project's rubric de
Cristina Hernández (crishesgarden)
Finally, as I said before, one of the features of rubrics is the possibility to share them with the students to make them aware of our expectations as teachers. For this reason, I have created a similar rubric but adapted to their language knowledge.
REFLECTION
This challenge has helped me to reflect on the importance of being clear when defining the assessment criteria.
I have discovered rubrics and used them for the first time and I honestly love them. I think they encourage an amount of positive things such as a good relation between the teacher and the student, good expectations between both, hard work, motivation, self-assessment and self-reflection. For this reason, I have decided to adapt it to the students, because they have the right to know in what they are going to be assessed. And they could also use it for self-assessment and reflection.
Teachers should also complete a rubric about the success of their project in order to recognise the mistakes and improve for the future.
As you can see, I have used 3 different programs to do the rubrics.
The first one is iRubric, an easy program where you just need to register and start working. It is good for embedding the rubric for instance in a blog, but the downside is that you cannot download it.
The second one is Quick Rubric which is also very simple and does not need registration. You just fill the table, add the necessary columns or rows and it is ready to download. Since this program doesn't have the option of sharing, I downloaded and used Slideshare to embed it.
Finally, for the most traditional ones, the third rubric has been made with Microsoft Word filling in the table and adding the images taken from Google Images. Then, I saved it as a PDF and uploaded to Issuu, the free online tool to share documents.
I have really enjoyed creating this rubrics as a way of concluding the educational project about the weather.
I know there is still learning missions missing but I need more time to work on them.
I hope you find this information useful and you can use it in your super projects!
Enjoy the rest of the weekend gardeners!
