MetaRubric: Playful Learning Experience for Assessment Literacy

• In Event: Playful Practice Spaces: Innovative Approaches for Next Generation Teacher Education

Abstract

Overview
In this poster, we present a playful learning experience for teachers called MetaRubric that was informed by a survey of innovative classroom assessment practices.

Framework
Our goal was designing a learning experience that would embody the ideas we had come to understand from our ambitious teachers’ practices. We decided to create a game-like playful activity because that genre lends itself well to the combination of individual and collaborative activities involved in creating and using rubrics.

In the MetaRubric activity, a group of 3-5 players chooses a movie that they have all seen and like. Then they are each asked to draw a movie poster for that movie—these drawings serve as the basis for the subsequent rubric construction, and they set players up to have both the experience of assessing using a rubric and being assessed by one. The next step is for players to individually write a list of criteria they think a good movie poster should meet, which starts the process of identifying what elements and skills are most important in a piece of work. From there they are asked to share and discuss their criteria in order to come up with one group rubric with a set of criteria they all agree on. This activity involves a lot of group discussion, in which many key parts of rubric creation emerge. The group typically discovers that some people have thought of concrete criteria such as “includes image of main character” or “has title of the movie”, while others have more creative items like “evokes strong emotion” or “depicts tragedy”. Players have to thoroughly explain why they think each criteria is important, and moreover what exactly that criteria means and how it would be evaluated.

These discussion topics are at the heart of the learner-directed explorations that form MetaRubric’s pedagogy, and they get players thinking deeply about what to assess and how to assess it. Once they have a group rubric, players use that rubric to score each other’s movie poster drawings and compare scores to identify the round 1 winner. Here they will usually run into challenges related to assigning point values—another key aspect to consider when designing a rubric. At the end of the round, the group is given discussion prompts to reflect on whether scoring was reliable or fair, and how evaluators may have differed.


Challenges and Insights
As described in this poster, our approach to this problem has been to survey current practices of expert teachers, pull out common themes, and design a playful learning experience that embodies key concepts. This is a grounded approach that can leverage existing expertise to make new teachers more effective and confident in the classrooms of today, while having fun in the learning process. We hope to utilize this method to understand and disseminate additional innovative teaching practices in the near future, and we encourage others to explore and experiment with this approach as well.

Authors

• Louisa Rosenheck, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Yoon Jeon Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology