Criteria and Validity (Chapter 8)

The learning process is full of important concepts which some of them help the learner to be aware of his/her performances, challenges, results and how they are progressing throughout this process. In Chapter 8 we can find two important concepts such as criteria, understanding and validity to explain how the learner is performing and how effective the assessments are.

After a test every teacher should assess and evaluate the students’ performance, which should always need to be based on a judgment supported by criteria. A good criteria focus on the deep issues of a piece of work more than on the first thing you see like grammar and length. Although, criteria importantly need to specify what the purpose of the test is and what are the main points to assess, it is to say that it is important to base the criteria on the main objectives of a work. Moreover, that is why with every piece of work teachers give to students it is important to have rubrics which will always support the teachers’ power of assessment and surely make this work of assessing easily.

Referring to rubrics we can describe them as Wiggins says in Chapter 8 “Rubrics describe degrees of quality, proficiency, or understanding along a continuum”. There exists two types of rubrics, holistic and analytic, where the holistic rubric is used to give a judgment of the students’ performance and it gives a general impression of it. On the other hand, analytic rubric have two ways to judge the students’ performance separately by dividing it by traits. It is important to highlight the representation of a descriptive rubric of criterion which is really analytic and allows us to give a score with evidences.

The chapter 8 also allows us to be conscious about the understanding. It says that understanding is a process which does not depend on right and wrong answers. If we focus on the assessment of understanding, it is necessary to create a rubric based on concrete ideas to assess which should go beyond the first look at the work like. A rubric is not complete until to have a deep analysis of the work identifying the main ideas of the author and may be go deeply in what are the really intentions of him/her and why express each idea in the way he/she does. It also necessary to clarify that each learner has a different point of view t see and understand things.
Validity is present in this chapter reviewed as the way to gain the results of a work based on concrete evidence. Some teachers base their corrections of tests or exams only in the precision of the answers than in the process students use to solve the problem. When students’ results of a test are good according to the teacher expectations and those expectations are based on just the precise answers as a book says, it does not really mean that the students understand. The idea here is to know how students go to gain that information and how they express it in their own words providing critical thinking.

In conclusion, students’ performances will depend on the process of assessment based on valid rubrics and a continuous understanding. Besides, the process of understanding goes accompanied with mental development.

Chapter III, "Gaining Clarity on Our Goals"

It is common knowledge for us that being a teacher is not a simple task. That is because it implies to spend a lot of time planning and assessing, among other tasks. When we talk about assessing and teaching we have to focus on the real purposes of doing that in terms of recognizing what are the learners’ needs and how the abilities will be assessed.
Sometimes, teachers have problems in the planning task because they have not clear what the goals are and what they really want students to do. I think here first of all it is important to know exactly what the needs of the learners are and how they would react in front of any situation or activity given for the teacher.
For example, the Chilean program to teach English gives to teachers all the necessary contents students should know at certain age or level. Besides, this program gives ideas to develop a class. So, the only task for the teacher is to plan the class by creating activities, games, etc to cover the contents. However, it is in this step of teaching where a significant number of teachers have problems with. It is difficult when teachers can not deal with big contents and the performance of the tasks, and here comes the difficulty to assess the contents in students.

On the other hand teachers have some problems in the teaching of certain contents. For example, it is common to have a large content which demands a lot of time developing it. But, sometimes it is not completely explained by the teacher because of the lack of time that she/he has. Therefore Grant Wiggins, author of the book “Understanding by Design”, states that “there is too much content and not enough time, especially if the identified knowledge and skills contained in the standards are viewed as discrete and disconnected”.

Discipline, is another important issue that teachers have to deal with. Sometimes, when the contents are not enough clear to students, it could be a huge discipline problem because learners could lose the attention on what the teacher is saying and they start doing different things which could affect the discipline in the classroom.

As a conclusion, planning for teachers is a tough task because of the different factors that it implies. So, it is really important that teachers should have clear ideas to plan their classes in order to have enough time to develop a lesson and also to not loose the control of a class.


Bibliography:
. Wiggins, Grant and McTighe, Jay. “Understanding by Design”, chapter 3 “Gaining Clarify on Our Goals”. 2005