Online Engagement: Rubrics

Hybrid and Blended Learning, Online Instruction, online learning, Online Teaching Practices, VLE, VLEs 0 comments

Online Engagement: Rubrics

Rubrics are essential tools in assessing student learning and course content understanding; besides, they can be used to provide timely feedback and guidance for students. Rubrics also allow faculty to determine whether a student is meeting specific requirements of an assignment or discussion or even a learning outcome included among the course specific objectives. Also, rubrics provide the opportunity for an instructor to give explicit feedback on the same features of an assignment along with a summative and/or formative assessment.

In ELT reading skills and literature courses, e.g., where lots of narrative samples have to be read by the students, a WebQuest can be a simple and accurate way of testing student understanding. In Reading Skills II, a course that in the English Language Teaching major students must take, it is common at Universidad Latina to use the PBL [Project-Based Learning] philosophy geared at having students use WebQuesting as part of their autonomous learning and reading skills training. Students are provided with a series of short stories that they have to read and analyze along the quarter, and a sample reading series of activities learners must carry out can be accessed at http://bin-08.blogspot.com/2012/05/webquest-quiz-1-version-b.html, which is a sci-fi story written by Elizabeth van Steenwyk entitled Something Funny.

Elizabeth van Steenwyk

For any kind of Internet-Based Learning [IBL] task a rubric has to be designed. The idea behind having a rubric for a WebQuest is not just to guide the student but to have them become aware of the aspects s/he will be graded on. For the Reading Skills II students, this is what they were confronted with:

School of English

BIN-08 Recounting the Story, Plot Analysis

Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano Assignment’s Total Points: 30

Student’s Name: ____________________________ University’s Term: I / II / III

CATEGORY	Excellent	Good	Fair
Conflict Identification	Student identifies conflict stated at the beginning of the story Points 5 – 4.75	Student has some trouble identifying the conflict in the story Points 4.5 – 4 – 3.5	Student barely identifies the conflict present in the story Points 3 – 2 – 1 – 0
Rising Action Description	Student is able to retell the story’s main events accurately Points 5 – 4.75	Student is somewhat able to recount the story’s main events with some difficulty Points 4.5 – 4 – 3.5	Student includes a glimpse of the main events in the story Points 3 – 2 – 1 – 0
Climax Identification	Student spots climax of the story without any trouble Points 5 – 4.75	Student has some problems identifying climax in the story Points 4.5 – 4 – 3.5	Student barely locates or does not spot the climax in the story Points 3 – 2 – 1 – 0
Resolution Statement	Student states story’s resolution effortlessly Points 5 – 4.75	Student has trouble identifying the story’s resolution Points 4.5 – 4 – 3.5	Student is not able to identify story’s resolution thoroughly Points 3 – 2 – 1 – 0
Use of Grammar and Punctuation	Great use of grammar structures and punctuation Points 5 – 4.75	Some faulty use of syntactical structures and problems with punctuation Points 4.5 – 4 – 3.5	Lots of grammar mistakes and a fair use of punctuation Points 3 – 2 – 1 – 0
Use of Web Resource	Student makes great and create use of the Web resource provided to retell story Points 5 – 4.75	Student makes good and creative use of the Web resource provided to recount story Points 4.5 – 4 – 3.5	Student makes fair use of the Web resource provided to tell the story again Points 3 – 2 – 1 – 0

COMMENTS:

If the rubric above gets to be compared with the WebQuest learners are provided at the class blog [http://bin-08.blogspot.com/2012/05/webquest-quiz-1-version-b.html], they both go hand in hand with everything students are asked to do for their literary analysis; there are no tricks or hidden steps the “average” student will have to follow to achieve the learning goal of the task. Not only are students’ works published by them on their personal reading blogs online, but they are also provided with the summative and formative feedback needed to shape their newly acquired understanding of the Formalistic Approach for literary understanding.

? To fully comprehend the scope of this teaching reflections, it is highly advisable that the following topics must be expanded further:

· Summative Assessment

· Formative Assessment

· WebQuesting

· Internet-Based Learning

Professor Jonathan Acuña-Solano

ELT Trainer, Instructor & Curriculum Developer based in Costa Rica

Active NCTE – Costa Rica Member

Resource Teacher & Curricular Developer at CCCN

Senior ELT Instructor at Universidad Latina, Costa Rica, since 1998

Contact Information:

Twitter @jonacuso

Email: jonacuso@gmail.com

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