[MUSIC] Hello all, so far in 3.1, we've heard a number of different ways to understand the problem, such as visualizing the problem, looking at keywords and taking time to find out what the real question is. In this lesson, I'd like to look at another way we can understand problems represented with a university, and this method is specific to assessment items. So what we'll be looking at is understanding the problem by checking the marking rubric. A marking rubric is the set of criteria used to evaluate an assessment item, and its main purpose is to make the marking consistent and clear for both markers and students. Any good university should make rubrics easily available for any student who's doing the assessment. If you don't have one, ask your lecturer or other teaching staff on the course. Another important use for rubrics is as a guide for students answering any kind of assessment, whether the assessment is a problem or not. In any assessment, you should constantly check to see that you're answering all parts of the question in order to maximize your grades. Do this before you start the assessment, while doing the assessment, and again at the end, to check that you have probably answer the question. In our case, we're going to look at how to use rubrics to understand problems. So, this is something you do when you are just beginning to define what the problem is for the assessment. Let's take a look at a specific example, imagine you're at university studying education. You're studying science curriculum design, and for your final assessment you've been sent this problem. Take a moment to read through, identify the key words and phrases, and think about how to answer it. It might seem strangely familiar to you, if you've done all the lessons and quizzes in module 2. Feel free to pause the video to read the question. So what are the keywords and phrases? Much of the first part is background, but there is some important information in there. Particularly, students are losing interest in Science and higher than average number of students with learning difficulties. Then after that, most of the information is key words and phrases. Design a curriculum, outline with the aim of increasing interest in science, and should include the sequence of units, descriptions of each unit, and all assessments for the course. Okay so before we look at the rubric let's think, what might you need to do to solve this problem? Well from the question, you'll definitely need to design a curriculum for a high school science course. You'll need to think of some units, decide how to organize them and also think of some assessments. The question mentions students with learning difficulties, so you'll need to think about that as you're designing your course. Looking at the question, you might also realize that your answer needs to address motivating the students as well. You might think based on this understanding, that you're now able to answer the question. But, now, let's take a look at the rubric for this, and see how that helps us to answer the question. Feel free to pause the video and take time to read the rubric. Looking at the rubric, we can now understand the problem a little better. We can see here that the rubric addresses how to organize the units in the curriculum, and here it addresses the assessments. It also mentions motivational strategies here and students with learning difficulties here. However, the rubric also mentions a number of things that we didn't consider when look at the task, things that help us understand the problem better. For example, we can see with this criterion, that we'll also need to consider national and state guidelines when we design the curriculum. Something we wouldn't have necessarily considered, just by looking at the question. There is also this mention of education policies in one of the criteria, another thing we wouldn't have necessarily thought was important to understanding the question. Finally, in the section on synthesis of theory and practice, we can see that we also need to use theory from the academic field, and apply it in this situation. If we hadn't consulted this rubric, we really wouldn't have understood the problem, and the likely outcome would be a much poorer assessment answer attracting less marks. So don't forget, for assessment items, check your marking criteria. [MUSIC]
