Sunday 20 March 2016

Gamification, Rubrics and Levels (or life after them!)

We have been gamifying education for a long time and it has worked along the same lines; if you do this, you will get this - certificates, grades, badges, stamps, achievement points, etc. So, gamification isn't a new thing, indeed gamifying the classroom/course isn't a new thing.
Rubrics have also been around for some time. The British curricula tend to focus on the grade descriptors as a basic rubric, leaving the teachers to fill in the gaps. Level assessed tasks are examples of basic rubrics but they tend not to be built in a manner that shows clear progression. It is progression that was demonstrated by the Assessing Pupil Progress rubrics that made them good for letting the teachers see what students were capable of doing and allowing the students to identify for themselves, and provide evidence for, the level they were working at. 
It seems to me that the use of rubrics is a no-brainer as they clearly define capabilities that can be evidenced: if you can do this, this is your level! Students have control over the level they achieve at and I have noticed that students who are willing to try can achieve very well in this form of assessment while not necessarily be strong under exam conditions.
For my masters degree all of the work I submitted was assessed using rubrics that were made available at the start of the task, along with exemplars, to give an idea of what was expected and the format expected. There was no guess work; I knew exactly what was required of me and I only ever looked at the column on the rubrics that would gain me 100% for the tasks. With this type of assessment, the teacher/instructor can be completely objective, particularly where skills are being demonstrated but that is not to say a rubric could not be used to record understanding of a concept using a Bloom's taxonomy style rubric. A task that asks students to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and application of a concept could be constructed using describe, explain and suggest command words:
Describe the flow of blood through the heart and circulatory system
Explain why the heart rate increases during exercise
Suggest what will happen to the heart rate at high altitudes; explain your thinking.

Tasks statements like these can be built into a rubric quite easily as they stand or could be broken down further.

Describe the flow of blood through the heart and circulatory system
0 - not done
10 - correct description of blood flow through the double circulatory system.
20 - 10 + all blood vessels, including capillaries, correctly named in the description.
30 - 20 + the flow of blood through the chambers of the heart correctly named and in order.

Explain why the heart rate increases during exercise
0 - not done
10 - the need for more oxygen to be delivered to appropriate respiring cells for aerobic respiration
20 - 10 + the need to deliver more fuel to respiring cells and remove the waste products as they increase to be excreted by the appropriate tissue
30 - 20 + the need to deal with the products of anaerobic respiration.

Suggest what will happen to the heart rate at high altitudes; explain your thinking
0 - not done
10 - correct reference to the activity of the heart
20 - 10 + correct reference to oxygen concentration at higher altitudes
30 - 20 + correct explanation of why the heart rate changes in relation to aerobic respiration and respiring cells.

Admittedly, it is quite easy to slip in markscheme writing when creating these but I purposefully left out the detail that a markscheme would have in order for the students to have to think about their answer, look it up, and write it in a coherent, structured sentence. In this regard, it might simply be easier to give students exam questions that ask use these command words!

If we consider that the writing of a science investigation to be a skill, and that the elements of writing it can be separated and practiced for, and that each element of the writeup could have rubric statements applied to them, could we not gamify this with graphs and badges? We already do this with grades! Could that rubric be built for progression from KS3 through to 5? The Edexcel GCSE Biology controlled assessment writeup requirements are very closely aligned to Edexcel AS Biology and would be a very good scaffold for writing investigations by Y12. Compared to the use of CORMS for planning in the Edexcel iGCSE, the controlled assessment is considerably better AS preparation as it considers analysis, conclusions and the use of secondary data. 

Life without levels is bringing up some interesting points in schools. What are schools doing to replace levels? Are they even bothering? https://nomoremarking.com/ suggests that the way forward is by comparative marking that is "seeded" with pieces of work that represent a grade boundary; for summative pieces of work I can see how this might work at the national level, but someone still had to generate the seeded work and decide upon what criteria the grade boundary represented. What is the difference between this and what we do now? Teachers will still need to use these exemplars to standardise their marking and be able to tell students what they need to be doing to improve.

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