In the land of education, Rubrics are everywhere. We design rubrics and use rubrics and sometimes don’t pause to think about them deeply.
Assessment is one of the last topics in my EDC 213 Psychology of Learning class. Most of the students in the class are early in their career as teacher candidates, so they have experience with assessments such as rubrics from a student’s perspective. None of them had ever worked with rubrics before or thought of developing of rubrics, so this was their first time thinking about constructing rubrics.
I learned about the game as part of the INSPIRE program at the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT.
MetaRubric is an example of a “practice space”, which is game or simulation designed to help teachers and preservice teachers learn and rehearse key skills in teaching (Reich et al., 2018). In MetaRubric, players begin by having everyone in the group create an artifact, such as a movie poster for a chosen movie. Then, the students generate some criteria for good movie posters, compile those criteria together, and use the compiled rubric to evaluate the posters.
My objective for the lesson was to have my students understand how to gauge the quality of student work when the parameters can be widely defined. To prepare for class I downloaded the MetaRubric cards from the website and put one card per slide on the power point slide deck. I integrated the game as an in-class “workshop” as part of their unit on assessment.
During class I gave a very brief introduction to the game. The the class of 40 students split into groups of 5 and followed the instructions on each card (slide). I gave very limited facilitation and only intervened to ask critical questions. The students first created movie posters. As I walked around the class I noticed that students were quickly and deeply engaged in the activity. Even those students who self-reported as being “non-artistic” eagerly worked on their drawings. Then the students made a list of criteria that created a good movie poster and created a share list (What happened here?). They took the list and evaluated all of the posters.
The groups all hit a common problem. Their rubrics could only identify the best examples of work. After identifying the best poster, the rest of their movie posters were tied for second place. I asked if they would want to be evaluated with their own rubrics, and the general consensus was no. The students recognized that rubrics need to provide feedback for a range of work.
We spent the entire class on “Round 1” designing and creating a rubric for their posters. I gathered feedback from students during the game and then briefly at the end of class. Through playing the game, the groups realized that designing rubrics is challenging.
Playing the game involved the preservice teachers in two very helpful practices: 1. Designing rubrics and more importantly, 2. doing the assignment and applying the rubric to the assignment. That can be very helpful in identifying rubrics that are too general or too specific. The game got the students actively engaged in the activity of thinking about assessment in a fun and playful way.
After a class on assessment, we will return to do Round 2 of MetaRubric, which is when the students create a rubric about what makes a good rubric (that’s the “meta” part). They have already told me that their rubrics will provide good standards that can also capture deviation.
Works Cited
Reich, J., Kim, Y. J., Robinson, K., Roy, D., & Thompson, M. (2018). Teacher Practice Spaces: Examples and Design Considerations. 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences, London, UK.
Assessment is one of the last topics in my EDC 213 Psychology of Learning class. Most of the students in the class are early in their career as teacher candidates, so they have experience with assessments such as rubrics from a student’s perspective. None of them had ever worked with rubrics before or thought of developing of rubrics, so this was their first time thinking about constructing rubrics.
I learned about the game as part of the INSPIRE program at the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT.
MetaRubric is an example of a “practice space”, which is game or simulation designed to help teachers and preservice teachers learn and rehearse key skills in teaching (Reich et al., 2018). In MetaRubric, players begin by having everyone in the group create an artifact, such as a movie poster for a chosen movie. Then, the students generate some criteria for good movie posters, compile those criteria together, and use the compiled rubric to evaluate the posters.
My objective for the lesson was to have my students understand how to gauge the quality of student work when the parameters can be widely defined. To prepare for class I downloaded the MetaRubric cards from the website and put one card per slide on the power point slide deck. I integrated the game as an in-class “workshop” as part of their unit on assessment.
During class I gave a very brief introduction to the game. The the class of 40 students split into groups of 5 and followed the instructions on each card (slide). I gave very limited facilitation and only intervened to ask critical questions. The students first created movie posters. As I walked around the class I noticed that students were quickly and deeply engaged in the activity. Even those students who self-reported as being “non-artistic” eagerly worked on their drawings. Then the students made a list of criteria that created a good movie poster and created a share list (What happened here?). They took the list and evaluated all of the posters.
The groups all hit a common problem. Their rubrics could only identify the best examples of work. After identifying the best poster, the rest of their movie posters were tied for second place. I asked if they would want to be evaluated with their own rubrics, and the general consensus was no. The students recognized that rubrics need to provide feedback for a range of work.
We spent the entire class on “Round 1” designing and creating a rubric for their posters. I gathered feedback from students during the game and then briefly at the end of class. Through playing the game, the groups realized that designing rubrics is challenging.
Playing the game involved the preservice teachers in two very helpful practices: 1. Designing rubrics and more importantly, 2. doing the assignment and applying the rubric to the assignment. That can be very helpful in identifying rubrics that are too general or too specific. The game got the students actively engaged in the activity of thinking about assessment in a fun and playful way.
After a class on assessment, we will return to do Round 2 of MetaRubric, which is when the students create a rubric about what makes a good rubric (that’s the “meta” part). They have already told me that their rubrics will provide good standards that can also capture deviation.
Works Cited
Reich, J., Kim, Y. J., Robinson, K., Roy, D., & Thompson, M. (2018). Teacher Practice Spaces: Examples and Design Considerations. 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences, London, UK.
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