Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

Authentic Assessment

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Md. Mostafa Rashel:
How Many Criteria do you Need for a Task?

Of course, I am not going to give you an easy answer to that question because there is not one. But, I can recommend some guidelines.
• Limit the number of criteria; keep it to the essential elements of the task. This is a guideline, not a rule. On a major, complex task you might choose to have 50 different attributes you are looking for in a good performance. That's fine. But, generally, assessment will be more feasible and meaningful if you focus on the important characteristics of the task. Typically, you will have fewer than 10 criteria for a task, and many times it might be as few as three or four.
• You do not have to assess everything on every task. For example, you might value correct grammar and spelling in all writing assignments, but you do not have to look for those criteria in every assignment. You have made it clear to your students that you expect good grammar and spelling in every piece of writing, but you only check for it in some of them. That way, you are assessing those characteristics in the students' writing and you are sending the message that you value those elements, but you do not take the time of grading them on every assignment.
• Smaller, less significant tasks typically require fewer criteria. For short homework or in-class assignments you might only need a quick check on the students' work. Two or three criteria might be sufficient to judge the understanding or application you were after in that task. Less significant tasks require less precision in your assessment than larger, more comprehensive tasks that are designed to assess significant progress toward multiple standards.

Ask. Ask yourself; you have to apply the criteria. Do they make sense to you? Can you distinguish one from another? Can you envision examples of each? Are they all worth assessing?

Ask your students. Do they make sense to them? Do they understand their relationship to the task?
Do they know how they would use the criteria to begin their work? To check their work?

Ask your colleagues. Ask those who give similar assignments. Ask others who are unfamiliar with the subject matter to get a different perspective if you like.

If you have assigned a certain task before, review previous student work. Do these criteria capture the elements of what you considered good work? Are you missing anything essential?

Dr. Mueller

Enduring ..........

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
Time for a Quiz!
Do you think you could write a good criterion now? Do you think you would know a good one when you saw one? Let's give you a couple small tasks:

Task 1: Write three criteria for a good employee at a fast-food restaurant. (There would likely be more than three, but as a simple check I do not need to ask for more than three. Assessments should be meaningful and manageable!)

Task 2: I have written three criteria for a good employee below. I intentionally wrote two clear criteria (I hope) and one vague one. Can you find the vague one among the three? Are the other two good criteria? (Yes, I wrote them so of course I think they are good criteria. But I will let you challenge my authority just this once :-)
•   the employee is courteous
•   the employee arrives on time
•   the employee follows the sanitary guidelines
What do you think? In my opinion, the first criterion is vague and the latter two are good criteria. Of course, evaluating criteria is a subjective process, particularly for those you wrote yourself. So, before I explain my rationale I would reiterate the advice above of checking your criteria with others to get another opinion.

To me, the statement "the employee is courteous" is too vague. Courteous could mean a lot of different things and could mean very different things to different people. I would think the employer would want to define the behavior more specifically and with more clearly observable language. For example, an employer might prefer:
•   the employee greets customers in a friendly manner

That is a more observable statement, but is that all there is to being courteous? It depends on what you want. If that is what the employer means by courteous then that is sufficient. Or, the employer might prefer:
•   the employee greets customers in a friendly manner and promptly and pleasantly responds to their requests

"Is that one or two criteria?" It depends on how detailed you want to be. If the employer wants a more detailed set of criteria he/she can spell out each behavior as a separate criterion. Or, he/she might want to keep "courteous" as a single characteristic to look for but define it as two behaviors in the criterion. There is a great deal of flexibility in the number and specificity of criteria. There are few hard and fast rules in any aspect of assessment development. You need to make sure the assessment fits your needs. An employer who wants a quick and dirty check on behavior will create a much different set of criteria than one who wants a detailed record.

The second criterion above, the employee arrives on time, is sufficiently clear. It cannot obviously name a specific time for arriving because that will change. But if the employer has identified the specific time that an employee should arrive then "arrive on time" is very clear. Similarly, if the employer has made clear the sanitary guidelines, then it should be clear to the employees what it means to "follow the guidelines."

"Could I include some of that additional detail in my criteria or would it be too wordy?" That is up to you. However, criteria are more communicable and manageable if they are brief. The employer could include some of the definition of courteous in the criterion statement such as
•   the employee is courteous (i.e., the employee greets customers in a friendly manner andpromptly and pleasantly responds to their requests)

However, it is easier to state the criterion as "the employee is courteous" while explaining to the employees exactly what behaviors that entails. Whenever the employer wants to talk about this criterion with his/her employees he can do it more simply with this brief statement. We will also see how rubrics are more manageable (coming up in Step 4) if the criteria are brief.

"Can I have sub-criteria in which I break a criterion into several parts and assess each part separately?" Yes, although that might be a matter of semantics. Each "sub-criterion" could be called a separate criterion. But I will talk about how to handle that in the next section "Step 4: Create the Rubric."



Dr. Mueller

Enduring ..........

Md. Mostafa Rashel:
Step 4: Create the Rubric
________________________________________
 Creating an Analytic Rubric
 Creating a Holistic Rubric
 Final Step: Checking Your Rubric
 Workshop: Writing a Good Rubric
 
Note: Before you begin this section I would recommend that you read the section on Rubrics to learn about the characteristics of a good rubric.

In Step 1 of creating an authentic assessment, you identified what you wanted your students to know and be able to do -- your standards.

In Step 2, you asked how students could demonstrate that they had met your standards. As a result, you developed authentic tasks they could perform.

In Step 3, you identified the characteristics of good performance on the authentic task -- the criteria.
Now, in Step 4, you will finish creating the authentic assessment by constructing a rubric to measure student performance on the task. To build the rubric, you will begin with the set of criteria you identified in Step 3. As mentioned before, keep the number of criteria manageable. You do not have to look for everything on every assessment.

Once you have identified the criteria you want to look for as indicators of good performance, you next decide whether to consider the criteria analytically or holistically. (See Rubrics for a description of these two types of rubrics.)


Dr. Mueller

Enduring ..........

shamsi:
Dear Sir:

Thanks for introducing such a practical assessment system.The examples you mentioned-I found it very much helpful to use in my classes.

Regards

Shamsi

Antara11:
Dear sir,

It's really helpful for every teacher to assess their students.

Regards,

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