Criteria and Validity

As teachers, our main goal is to make students learn. A teching learning process is nothing without assessment, it means that we need to get evidence along the process of how the students are performing, at the end of this, an evaluation should be given in order to have results of the level of understanding that students have of the contents. But at the moment of an evaluation, how can we determine the specific points that we want our students to succeed in, therefore to make a judgement of the performance in each one of these? This is what is called criteria. Then, since we need to know in what level of understanding our students are, it is necessary an instrument for measuring this and tell how proficient students are in each one of the evaluated points; this instrument is called rubric. In chapter 8, Wiggins invites us, as teachers, to find out the importance of criteria and rubrics, and also the role that validity has to play within these two concepts.

Why do teachers need criteria for? We already agreed on the idea that in order to make an evaluative instrument valid, we have to select what we want our students to be proficient in from the contents they learned. This is what criteria are about, to categorise the main points that are important for students to succeed in. Since teachers want quality in students’ tasks, good criteria should not focus on superficial and quantity aspects (Wiggins, p 173). Depth in content, good writing style, backed up and “right through” information are issues that they should consider in order to find out the understanding of every student. However, do teachers know what to include as criteria? This is the role that rubrics play; these also distinguish the quality of performance by the score given. Teachers tend to evaluate through analytic rubrics (Wiggins, p173) which divides the performance into different categories which tell how proficient the student is in each one of them by the given score.

Depending on the effectiveness of the criteria and the rubric, we can tell about how valid the evaluative instrument, it means that validity also determines the criteria to be considered -for example- to make a paper valid, the teacher will not foccus on what font, format, or how many drawings the student used to illustrate the paper, but in other kinds of parameters. Besides from the processes of assessment and evaluation we can get enough and propper evidence based on the kind of task the student had to fulfill. Nonetheless, there is another issue to be considered, which are the conditions in which the test was taken and the consequences that they can leave (Wiggins, p 188) For example, a boy can be given a test the same day he told that his mother had an accident, obviously his performance in the test is really bad due to the emotional stress that he is suffering from that day, however, if the test was taken in totally normal conditions, the performance, would be much better and the results as well.

As future teachers, we should consider all these factors in order not to waste an evaluative process. The criteria have to meet the level of understanding that the student will be able to reach. We have to be very careful on what students will be able to learn and understand from the contents studdied, therefore to make important decisions about the continuity of the course.