Michael Scipione

Though it's hard for students to turn in their work on time regardless of the setup of the class, I find myself making concessions to 'help them along' and accept late work.  One such penalty would be 10% points each day an assignment is late.

f you want students to collaborate it is imperative that educators establish this as a norm at the beginning of the school year. Great teachers leverage group work and collaborative activities and projects in their curriculum and instruction, but oftentimes teachers “push-back” with the difficulties of having their students collaborate. I agree, it is a daunting task, but I always respond, “How have you taught them to collaborate and providing scaffolding of that skill?” This is the key! If you want your students to collaborate effectively, you must give the opportunity to do so, as well as give the necessary… >>>

I've compiled a list of some of my tips for balancing work and life based on my experience. At Work 1. Keep Your Schedule Open -- Since I'm a business owner, I can create my own schedule. I need to remind myself that I don't need to be busy every single day to be successful. 2. Delegate Duties -- I have many people willing to help me out and I'm learning to take them up on their offers. As hard as it might be to trust someone else with your work, it may end up working out for the better… >>>

Regardless of whether you are modifying an existing rubric, creating one from scratch, or using a rubric developed by another party, both before and after you use the rubric is a good time to evaluate it and determine if it is the most appropriate tool for the assessment task. Questions to ask when evaluating a rubric include: Does the rubric relate to the outcome(s) being measured? The rubric should address the criteria of the outcome(s) to be measured and no unrelated aspects. Does it cover important criteria for student performance? Is the rubric authentic, does it reflect what was emphasized… >>>

As described by D. Stevens (2005) Five Basic Parts of a Rubric Part 1: Course Learning Outcome We have added this as a rubric component (to the basic four outlined in Introduction to Rubrics). Course learning outcomes are your expectations for what you want students to learn by the end of a course. Your assignments and other curricular activities should help students achieve these outcomes and the rubric is an effective way of assessing the levels of their achievement. Placing the course learning outcome at the top of the grading rubric gives relevance to the assignment. Part 2: Task Description… >>>

They take more time to create and use. There are more possibilities for raters to disagree. It is more difficult to achieve intra- and inter-rater reliability on all of the dimensions in an analytic rubric than on a single score yielded by a holistic rubric. There is some evidence that raters tend to evaluate grammar-related categories more harshly than they do other categories (McNamara, 1996), thereby overemphasizing the role of accuracy in providing a profile of learners' proficiency. There is some evidence that when raters are asked to make multiple judgement, they really make one. Care must be taken to… >>>