Update Photography I rubrics.

In Effective Grading; A Tool for Learning and Assessment, Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson lay out a strategy for using a system of rubrics to expedite grading and assessment. Walvoord and Anderson call their rubric system PTA Scales - Primary Trait Analysis Scales. The principal is simple. You can clearly articulate the traits you are looking for in student work. You describe, in plain language, several different levels of success for each of those traits. Each level of success is given a value. In effect, you have a tool for collecting data about your student’s success across the traits you are measuring.

You can use the PTA to articulate to students at the outset of a project what success or failure looks like. You can use the PTA to simplify and speed up grading. Most importantly, you can use the data you collect to measure student learning in your courses and as a basis for assessment of your courses.

If you’ve never read the book and you teach, go to Amazon now and order a copy. It was a career-changing discovery for me when I found it - it clarified so much that I had difficulty understanding about my courses. And on more than one occasion, I have used information gleaned from course assessment to make valuable changes to my classes. The PTA stuff is just the beginning, really.

At any rate, my Photography I assignments all have a PTA associated with them. Unfortunately, they were all written more than five years ago when I taught at another institution, in a different darkroom, with a different group of students.

Also, Rochester Community and Technical College has been making a big push on institutional assessment, and there are a lot of assessment tools floating around my job. The school seems to have agreed on a format for laying out these tools that is different than the ones I created on my own five years ago. I made a couple of major mistakes then, and finally felt like it was time to make some changes.

The rubrics I made originally were formatted vertically, with traits running down the page. They were really wordy. They tended to have incomplete, run-on sentences. They weren’t relevant to printing on RC paper and using easels with fixed borders, like we do here in the darkroom at RCTC. They ran across multiple pages. When it was time to use the rubrics for grading, I was intimidated. Imagine how my students felt about reading them on D2L.

You can find an original rubric here, for an artificial light project.

I wanted rubrics that were short and concise. I wanted rubrics that fit on one page. I wanted rubrics that looked more like what is quickly becoming RCTC’s institutional standard - a horizontal grid with values running across columns and traits running down rows. Most importantly, I need to update the content to reflect printing with RC paper, in fixed-border easels like we do in the RCTC darkroom. I wanted rubrics I wasn’t afraid to read when it was time to grade.

You can find the updated rubric here, for the same project.

I am always happy to share more rubrics or projects, leave a comment or send an email if you are interested in talking more.