This week in class, we were asked to create an evaluative rubric for an activity that was part of a lesson plan that we created in a previous class.
In the previous class, I had created a lesson on cellular respiration and the activity that was to be used as an assessment was called the "Respiration Challenge." In this challenge, groups of students would be given a mystery chemical that was a cellular respiration disrupter. They would have to research the chemical and use their knowledge of the various steps of cellular respiration to make a presentation on the effect of that chemical. This assignment would assess the students' grasp on cellular respiration by making them manipulate the components of the processes and predict how the outcome would change.
The rubric for this activity can be found here: Respiration Challenge Rubric
Because this was my first attempt at creating a rubric, I found this assignment to be very challenging. My questions consisted of: What should I be assessing for? How do I differentiate between "meeting expectations" and "approaching expectations"? What does it mean to exceed expectations? How easy should it be to get a perfect score? The questions piled up and I found that answering meant that I had to make decisions about what type of teacher I wanted to be.
We were advised by the instructor of our course to come up with an idea of what the best and worst possible assignment would look like and go from there. I found this to be an interesting exercise and a helpful way to create parameters for the assignment.
One issue that I struggled with was whether or not to create the "exceeds expectations" as a category that has no room for error. As the rubric stands now, getting 3 points on a part of the assignment means that no mistakes were made in that category. I would like to do more research to see what the impact is on students if they see that there is no wiggle room at the top.
I've enjoyed this activity because it required me to evaluate what my expectations and standards will be as a teacher. I am interested to see how these standards change as I continue in this program and into practical experience with assessment.
