Its the Rubric stupid

In FET5601 we have studied a number of topics in the last month including assessment and evaluation. So we touched on criterion referenced assessment.

This of course was quite familiar to me in practice, if not in theory. I have used a lot of criterion referenced rubrics for projects and assignments in Dubai in the last several years.

Thus the irony when I realised that I had totally missed significant criteria on the rubrics of both courses, FET5601 and FET562. Duh.. Talk about feeling dumb.

So.. being one who wants to learn from my mistakes I try to draw some salient lessons from this. The obvious lesson is of course, double check the rubric before submitting any assignment.

In this next round of assignments my natural knee-jerk reaction is to include points from the rubric in my response explicitly and to make the assignment a 'response to the rubric'. This of course is safer than ignoring the rubric but could lead to a rather stilted response. It would affect the structure and perhaps not is a good way.

The other lesson to consider is how to make sure my students don't miss parts of the rubric. In the past I have handed out the rubric as the assignment definition. i.e. the assignment was the rubric.

I am reflecting on this at the moment. This is a graduate level course, we are supposed to be able to research, gather information and synthesis it into something informative useful and original. This requires some creativity which can not be confined to the structure implied by following a rubric unflinchingly.

The more I consider this, the more I recognise a weakness I have in scholarly writing. This has always been a bit of an achilles heal for me. I am pretty good at researching information. But I tend to be in to much of a hurry to put the words to paper without a careful consideration of interrelations of new ideas, theories, previous practice, and understanding, constucting a new whole which is greater than the sum of the parts. This is after all in the end the purpose of enquiry and review.

I beleive a weakness can become a strength when the focus for change is there. This is the point of this post and will exercise my mind for some time.

So what can I do?

• always double check and consider the rubric before submitting any assignment
• look for ways integrate the rubric into a whole