Assessment of the project

Hello again 21cenTeachers!

As you know, it has been a while since I started to design the prototype of  my open educational project: Live a healthy life. Meanwhile, I have had to ovecome a bunch of challenges which have given me the opportunity of realising that a new sort of education, in which students are motivated through cooperative and collaborative work, is truly practicable. Additionally, I have learnt to manage many online tools which will be really useful for me and my future students.

Today I am going to share with you the steps I followed to overcome this challenge of our ICT class. This challenge consists in designing a rubric that assesses a part of my open educational e-project. This rubric has to include the key aspects of my project, the expected  improvement for my students and the assessment criteria that I consider necessary. 

As you know, one of the key aspects of CLIL is the assessment process. The assessment in CLIL has to be summative and formative. In other words, it has not only to evaluate and grade student´s work at the end of certain unit but also to monitor their learning and provide them with ongoing feedback.

Retrieved from Pixabay

When it comes to assessing our students, we, as CLIL teachers, must take into account different aspects. First, we must decide in advance what is the focus of the assessment: language, content or both? Then, this assessment process will be based on clear criteria which must be set in advance and in accordance with the expected outcomes. In this context, a complet rubric must include the following aspects:

• Focus of assessment

• Assessment criteria

• Scale of grading

• Clear descriptions

A rubric is an useful tool for both teachers and students to evaluate different aspects of the learning process. Rubrics are normally used to grade students´work but they can also serve as a tool to evaluate teacher´s work. When used in a CLIL context, rubrics have the potential to help students understand and develop high order thinking skills (analysis and evaluation). In this way, students should be able to use rubrics in many of the same ways that teachers use them.

Now I would like to share with all of you the rubric that I have created with an online tool called QuickRubric. This tool provide us with the necessary options to create accurate and complete rubrics for assessing our students´work. It help us save a lot of time since it provides its users with a practical template to fill up with the evaluation and grading criteria. Below you can have a look at said rubric which I uploaded to SlideShare. You can also take a look at my rubric by clicking in this link.

Rubrica de Daniel Marques

As you can see, the focus of assessment in this rubric is a combination of language, content and skills. This rubric will provide the teacher with valuable information about different aspects of students´ learning process. By using this rubric, we will try to assess the whole learning acquired while overcoming the mission (content related to the topic, language used, creativity, digital skills and group work capacity). Moreover, this rubric will help teachers know better what they evaluate and what criteria they have to follow.

Before finishing I would like to make clear that the assessment used in my OEP is alligned with InfoEDUgrafías since this collaborative movement I joined promotes the usage of rubrics when it comes to assessing the students´ learning. You can take a look at a rubric that InfoEDUgrafias provides as a sample to assess infographics by clicking here.
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To conclude, as always, I would like to reflect on my own learning process and the different steps I had to follow to come up with the final product (rubric). As far as assessment is concerned, it would be very quick and easy for us, as teachers, to evaluate our students like we were evaluated some years ago. Do you remember how we were evaluated at school? Yes, the whole assessment process revolved around an isolated evidence of learning: the exam. We were taught in a passive way an evaluated with different tests or exams. But, would that be fruitful for our students? Do they deserve it? The answer is absolutely no! It is well known nowadays that there are many other ways and tools to evaluate students´ learning process and they are proved to be much more beneficial both for teachers and for students.

Regarding the creation of rubrics for evaluating students, I have to say that I did not know too much about them. But I have learnt that rubrics are an excellent tool to evaluate our students´work. Moreover, I have learnt that rubrics must include different aspects that will help teachers know clearly what and how they want to evaluate. 

To finish, I would like to recommend the tool QuickRubric to anyone interested in creating rubrics. This online tool is very easy to use and it fully meets user expectations. For this reason, I truly believe that it should be taken into account by any teacher when designing and creating rubrics.

I hope you like my post.

See you soon!