View Content #26429

This activity was created to help teachers implement student-friendly rubrics for Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs). Each of these rubrics is aligned with the 2012 ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and involves the articulation of indicators of mastery, or content and genre-specific expectations, for learners that accompany the rubrics.

Materials Needed: Mastery rubric aligned to the 2012 ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, an IPA, and an example IPA rubric with indicators of mastery (for reference)

Procedure:

1. Create a mastery rubric for the communicative modes (ideally plus interculturality) that is aligned to the proficiency expectations for your students. If you do not already have one such rubric, these typically are divided into four achievement levels:
   1.  The highest level of achievement should require a bit of risk-taking (e.g., applying knowledge in a new context) and should describe learners beginning to develop the next sub-level of proficiency.
   2. The third highest level of achievement should describe learners squarely performing at the targeted sub-level of proficiency.
   3. The second highest level of achievement should describe learners for whom the targeted sub-level of proficiency is emerging but inconsistently met.
   4. The lowest level of achievement should describe learners who generally do not perform at the targeted sub-level of proficiency.
2. Next to the descriptors for each mode (and interculturality), create an additional column. You will use this column to articulate your indicators of mastery.
3. Review the IPA that you are going to give students and identify the specific content and genre-specific knowledge (e.g., targeted structures, registers of language, and structural and rhetorical devices) that will be demonstrated by learners performing at the highest level. Take note of these expectations.
4. Start developing indicators of mastery of that articulate the knowledge you identified in Step 3. Consider and articulate what the knowledge would ‘look like’ for a student performing at each of the lower levels on the rubric. Important: Make sure to articulate each of these indicators based on the knowledge that is proven (proficiency-oriented) rather than what is absent (deficiency-oriented). This may require careful word choice. For example, you may want to use language like this:
   1. Level 1: Targeted structure/genre-specific expectation/interpretive question or task type was attempted.
   2. Level 2: Targeted structure/genre-specific expectation/interpretive question or task type appears in student work with correct treatment from time-to-time (the specific number of times may be articulated by teachers depending on the assessment).
   3. Level 3: Targeted structure/genre-specific expectation/interpretive question type or task appears in student work with correct treatment with general consistency (‘general consistency’ may be specifically defined by teachers depending on the assessment).
   4. Level 4: There are few, if any errors, in student work regarding the targeted structure/genre-specific expectation/interpretive question/task type. Some risk-taking with the targeted structure/genre-specific expectation/interpretive question task or type is evident.
5. Consider your indicators and eliminate redundancies. Each higher level of performance assumes that all of the previous level has been demonstrated, so it is unnecessary to articulate the same expectation more than once.
6. Review the rubric and indicators of mastery with your learners often throughout the course of their learning activities designed to prepare them for the IPA at hand. Connect their learning activities clearly to those expectations.
7. Deliver the IPA. Protect time for learners to use the indicators of mastery to predict their scores.
8. Score the IPA. Simply begin at the lowest level of achievement and start checking off the indicators of mastery that appear in the student work. Once you arrive at indicators of mastery that are not represented in student work, stop checking them off. Assign the score that corresponds to the place on the rubric you were when you stopped checking.
9. Reflect on your students’ work and your indicators of mastery to determine what changes, if any, should be made before the next time you deliver the IPA. Take note of those changes.

Notes:

Sometimes, particularly with interpretive assessments, learners may actually answer the most difficult questions well but miss some of the more basic ones. For these students, use a best-fit approach when determining their grade in lieu of strict adherence to the process described in Step 8.

At most schools, mastery rubric grades have to be converted to the 100-point scale. A general rule-of-thumb to guide this process is to make Level 4 an A, Level 3 a B, Level 2 a C/D+, and Level 1 a D-/F.