Effective Teaching...
by Harry and Rosemary Wong

October 2007

Taking the Bite Out of Assessment
—Using Scoring Guides

Last month you saw a picture of us playing Mexican Train.  This month we’re eating hamburgers…and scoring them!  We’re using a rubric or scoring guide to rate the quality of the hamburgers.

As a birthday gift, we received an invitation to go to three restaurants that had reputations for serving good hamburgers.  A scoring guide had to be devised so we could score each hamburger fairly.  Click here to see the hamburger scoring guide.

Scoring guides are familiar to students, as they use scoring guides in the many games they play.  By developing their own scoring guides, your students will see the value of having a scoring guide to assess their work.

Students can be involved in developing their own scoring guides.  They will see that a scoring guide

• specifies the level of performance achieved for a specific category or task.
• can help them and their teachers define “quality.”
• can help them judge and revise their own work before handing in assignments.
• communicates to them and their parents what is expected of an assignment.
• is focused on producing good work, not on grading.

Picture your students with a study guideline in one hand with the objectives for the lesson.  With objectives, they know what they are responsible for learning.  For information on structuring a lesson with objectives, see The First Days of School, Unit D and our August 2003 column, “How to Start a Lesson Plan.”

Now picture your students with a scoring guide in the other hand that spells out how their assignment will be scored, graded, or assessed.

Just think.  Yes, just think what would happen to student learning
if the students knew what they were to learn,
and how they would be scored or graded?
They would know how to reach success and achievement.

Students fail when some teachers cover chapters, do activities to entertain the students, or show videos that have no purpose to a lesson.  These teachers are more concerned with what they put into a lesson, rather than what learning outcomes result from the students.  The students, thus, have no idea what they are responsible for learning and how they will be assessed for the quality of their work.

Scoring Guide for Listening

In our February 2007 column, “Students Want a Sense of Direction,” we shared a scoring guide used by Karen Rogers for determining how well students listen in class to a presentation.

Just think how much more students will listen to a presentation if they had a role in helping to develop this scoring guide?

Multimedia Is Everywhere

Starting in the fall of 2007, the University of Chicago’s School of Business will begin requiring prospective students to submit four pages of PowerPoint-like slides with their applications.  The purpose is to allow students to show off a creative side that might not reveal itself in test scores, recommendations, and even essays.

Rather than having the university dictate what is to be said with a set of questions or outline, the applicant is given four blank sheets of paper to be creative—a fact needed for success in life.

Undergraduates already submit art work and videos with their applications.  Why not allow graduates the same latitude to better identify the students with a creative spark.

First graders are more often computer savvy and are helping to solve the high tech glitches in the classroom.  Children are brought up and surrounded by various forms of media.  They are motivated by and learn from media.  Thus, teachers must have knowledge of the use of media to be able to teach specific standards.

The Etiwanda School District in Southern California has a set of technology standards for its classes.  The basic standard is as follows:

Presentation provides students with an understanding of how to
effectively use information technology tools to communicate ideas
and information using a variety of media.

To meet this standard, objectives have been formulated for each grade level.

Kindergarten and Grade 1

Scoring Guide for a Multimedia Presentation

We have shared Norm Dannen in past columns.  The most recent was in October 2006, “Assessing Student Progress With a Rubric.”

Norm designed a lesson to teach some short stories by Ernest Hemingway.  To see his lesson plan, click here.

In the story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, he had his students prepare a multimedia presentation.

The small group projects had the following structure all centered around developing and marketing a vacation package to Africa:

To guide the students in their preparation of their multimedia presentations, he gave them each a scoring guide. To see this scoring guide, click here.

Both Karen Rogers’ guide for listening and Norm Dannen’s scoring guide on multimedia presentations can be applied to all classes.

To see the multimedia presentation a group of his students prepared, click here.

A Career Choice He Would Not Hesitate to Make

Norm Dannen just started his third year as a teacher.  He worked for AT&T for 25 years and when they downsized, he decided that he needed a new direction in his life.

Earlier in his career, he had taught high school English as a way to pay for graduate school.  He liked it so much that he resolved to return to it one day.  So, with this juncture in his life, he enrolled in an alternative certification program, New Pathways to Teaching in New Jersey (NPTNJ).

His first job was as a maternity leave replacement at Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin, New Jersey.  While he was there, Norm attended an Alternative Path conference where we (Harry) spoke.  Norm shared his work with us.  Norm credits Dr. Tom Vona of the Alternate Path Program for teaching him this work.  What he shared became the subject of two related articles on teachers.net dealing with lesson plans and assessment strategies. (May 2006 and October 2006)

At the end of his first year of teaching, Norm was named the 2005-2006 First Year Teacher of the Year by the Southern Regional High School District.  He returned to Southern for the 2006-2007 school year.  In the spring of 2007, a tenure-track teaching position much closer to home became available and he applied for it.

Within a month, he was offered a position teaching freshman English at a newly opened career academy called Biotechnology High School, run by the Monmouth County Vocational School District, which is where he is now.

The reason the brief teaching career of Norm Dannen has been shared with you is to show that new teachers can succeed rather quickly.  Our teachers.net articles are full of examples of first year teachers who succeeded, literally, on their first day as teachers.  They began by knowing what to do.

Check the archive in the latest June column and scroll through to read about these teachers.  Use them as examples for your success.

As Norm says, “Although my return to the classroom has not been without hurdles, it has provided me with some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.  It has been a career choice I would not hesitate to make again.”

The Taste of Success

Whether you are scoring hamburgers or multimedia presentations, a guide to how content will be rated is essential.  While we did not share our scoring guide with the cook at our burger joints, the restaurant was blind in knowing what we deemed to be a good hamburger.

Students, on the other hand, need to know before the assignment begins what is quality and what is not quality.  Does the bun matter or not?  What demonstrates mastery of an objective—achievement of the goal?

Students can’t be working without the ability to savor success.

To introduce your class to a scoring guide, select something appropriate for the ages of students and do an assignment with them.  For instance, ask the question who makes the best bubble gum, brand A or brand B?  Have input as to what constitutes good bubble gum.  Taste, quality of bubbles, chewiness, and so on.  Assign values to the degree of each quality.  (Of course, if chewing bubble gum for 15 minutes as a class project is not going to work in your setting, select something to suit your students and their limitations.)

Distribute the gum and let them chew away and assess the outcome.

They will come to understand how they can apply this to their own assignments by looking at the quality of their work and knowing where they need to improve.  In their bubble gum ratings, all criteria will not get the highest mark, but in a simple glance of the scoring guide, students, teachers, and parents can easily identity where the need for improvement lies.

As for our hamburger quest, we have one more to score.  If you want to know our winner for the best hamburger in the San Francisco bay area, write and ask us at the end of the month.  We’ll be happy to let you know.

With a scoring guide, assessing for achievement becomes a palatable task for all.  No more heartburn and indigestion waiting for grades.  A scoring guide lists all the ingredients for student success.  Invite your students to taste achievement.  Bon appétit and Happy Halloween!

For a printable version of this article click here.