EDU 6160 – Blog Post Assignment #3

In this week’s post, I will describe a rubric to be used in a future unit with attention to strengths and limitations. A rubric is a set of guidelines or rules used for evaluating and grading students’ performance. For the content area of health/fitness, on a daily basis, my mentor and I evaluate students based on attendance, participation, behavior, fitness progress and skill development. Currently, students assess themselves at the beginning and end of the semester based on Figure 1. Prior to turning in the rubric, a guardian must sign that they have read their student’s behavior self-assessment. This sets a clear understanding of the expectations over the course of the semester. 

In our lifestyle activities class, units last the duration of two weeks with a pre-test in the beginning and post-test at the end. Students are only graded based on their post-test scores for each unit. However, I believe that it would be beneficial to implement a rubric in order to evaluate students’ unit performance. In order to develop an effective rubric for a future unit, I will first consider the following: 1) Students being involved in creating the rubric. As stated by Shermis and Di Vesta (2011), “Students must be brought into the process gradually and consistently. They should have a part in developing the rubrics, and eventually there should be no mystery or ambiguity regarding how the performance is to be judged” (p. 142). By involving students in the process of developing a rubric, I will be able to assume that every student understands what is to be learned during the unit and why each grade was earned at the end of the unit. Also, this allows for me to ensure that the rubric is written in a student-friendly language that communicates clear expectations. 2) Rubric categories and ratings. As indicated by Shermis et al. (2011), “An effective means by which evaluators address quality is to analyze the performance into its key subdomains

and assign ratings to each performance dimension” (p. 133). Figure 2 presents a set of tennis skill categories (i.e. serving, striking and teamwork) and progress rating scale for each category with descriptions. By considering both 1 and 2, I believe that I will be able to effectively develop a unit rubric in order to evaluate student progress and performance.

References

Game, Set and Match! (2014, May 5). Retrieved October 22, 2016, from http://pegraded.blogspot.com/2014_05_01_archive.html

Shermis, M. D., & J., D. V. (2011). Classroom assessment in action. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.