Educational Psychology

11. Teacher-made assessment strategies

Score 1

There is an attempt to describe the plot, setting, or characters

Some statements about the plot, setting, or characters are arranged in a manner that

makes sense.

Ideas or judgments may be supported with some facts and details from the story.

Not Proficient

Score 1

The response demonstrates little or no skill in reading comprehension.

The plot, setting, or characters are not described, or the description is unclear.

Statements about the plot, setting, or characters are not arranged in a manner that

makes sense.

Ideas or judgments are not stated, and facts and details from the text are not used.

Source: Adapted from English Language Arts Grade 2 Los Angeles Unified School District, 2001

(http://www.cse.ucla.edu/resources/justforteachers_set.htm)

Analytical rubrics provide descriptions of levels of student performance on a variety of characteristics. For
example, six characteristics used for assessing writing developed by the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory
(NWREL) are:

• ideas and content


• organization


• voice


• word choice


• sentence fluency


• conventions
  Descriptions of high, medium, and low responses for each characteristic are available from:
  http://www.nwrel.org/assessment/toolkit98/traits/index.html)..)
  Holistic rubrics have the advantages that they can be developed more quickly than analytical rubrics. They are
  also faster to use as there is only one dimension to examine. However, they do not provide students feedback about
  which aspects of the response are strong and which aspects need improvement (Linn & Miller, 2005). This means
  they are less useful for assessment for learning. An important use of rubrics is to use them as teaching tools and
  provide them to students before the assessment so they know what knowledge and skills are expected.

Teachers can use scoring rubrics as part of instruction by giving students the rubric during instruction,
providing several responses, and analyzing these responses in terms of the rubric. For example, use of accurate
terminology is one dimension of the science rubric in Table 40. An elementary science teacher could discuss why it

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