In this module you will learn how to check and improve your rubric to ensure it enables you to gather accurate evidence about a student’s ability when assessing their work or performance.
Activities
1. Watch the video 'Improve rubrics'
After you have used your rubric, you will typically find there are some improvements that can be made to ensure ease of use and accuracy of results when assessing student work and providing formative feedback.
Watch the video on how to improve the actions and quality criteria in your formative assessment rubric.
The video duration is 7 minutes 24 seconds.
Module 7 – Improve rubrics video transcript
Module 7 – Improve rubrics PowerPoint
2. Review the organising elements and actions
The first things to examine are the organising elements and related actions. Ensure that these two components work together to identify the important skills that you want to develop in students.
Did you find cells within the formative assessment rubric that had ‘and’ in the descriptor? This may mean that you have combined two actions, and this will make the action more difficult to accurately assess. What do you do if a student can do one component but not the other? It is easier to separate this one action into two actions. This separation may mean that you have fewer quality criteria for each action, but they will be more specific and thus easier to use.
3. Review the quality criteria
Next you should ensure the quality criteria are expressed in a way that ensures consistent assessment. Check that each quality criterion describes student ability in positive language, identifies clear and correctly ordered increments in skill, and attends to one central idea.
Review the quality criteria in relation to the use of adjectives, adverbs and negative descriptors, as these will make the formative assessment rubric difficult to use. Removing or amending these will ensure consistent assessment of what a student can currently do, make, say or write.
You may need to do the following to improve the quality criteria in your rubric:
- Swap the order of the quality criteria because the student data shows earlier criteria is harder than later criteria. This is dealing with a shift in difficulty.
- Combine two criteria or remove a criterion because the current quality criteria do not show a step up in the level of sophistication. Remember, you don’t have to include quality criteria for each phase in the rubric.
- Add a new criterion because the quality criterion currently at the highest level is not reflecting what the students are able to do, say, make or write.
4. Evaluate your work
Refinements to the rubric are best made with colleagues who have also used the rubric. Where this is not possible, it is still worth asking a colleague to read the rubric and give you feedback. You should ask them to focus on particular areas in the rubric so you get specific feedback that will support you to make any refinements to the actions and quality criteria.
After you have refined your rubric it should be easier to use when assessing student work or performance and when providing formative feedback and planning your next teaching and learning.
Practice considerations
- Reflect on using the formative assessment rubric when assessing student work or performance. Did you:
- find the rubric easy to use? Were the quality criteria clear in describing increasing levels of sophistication?
- use the evidence gathered to plan your teaching and give feedback to students?
- find that the rubric supported teachers to make consistent judgments? This question is only applicable if more than one teacher has used the rubric.
- You should apply the rubric writing strategies that were outlined in
Module 2 and ‘Part 2: Developing a formative assessment rubric’ in the Guide.
- If you were able to moderate the marking of student work, this will assist you in identifying any actions or quality criteria where there was inconsistency between teachers.
- Remember that shifts in difficulty in the criteria may mean they no longer align well with the phase descriptions.
Module 8 illustrates how to rectify this situation.
Additional resources
- Refer to the
Victorian Curriculum F–10. Viewing the curriculum in the ‘Scope and Sequence’ format helps to clearly see the continuum describing growth across eleven years of schooling. Scope and sequence charts are found in the ‘Introduction’ to each curriculum area.
- Refer to ‘Further reading’ on page 25 of
The Guide to Formative Assessment Rubrics.
Move on to Module 8
When a rubric is refined, it may be the case that the new quality criteria, actions and organising elements no longer align with the learning continuum and phases. The adjustment of these two elements is addressed in Module 8.
These materials were prepared in 2019. Please note that this area of research is evolving fast, therefore these materials should be supported with additional evidence bases that more accurately reflect best practice after 2024. It is recommended that these materials be used with consideration of updated research after this date.