NAEP Reflection

When first presented with the problems for this project I was a little worried. It is always nerve wrecking being given a problem for 8th graders and below....or high schoolers, and being asked to solve it. As college students we should hopefully be able to but it is also work we haven't worked with in a long time. My group had the Data Analysis problem where the students were told to pick a graph to represent the information presented to them. When given all of the student work we decided to go through them one at a time and read the rubric and put them in stacks according to where we believe each one belonged. We had a lot of partial and minimum options, the problem with this is the rubric description for both option was pretty similar. We then took each pile and very strictly compared it to the rubric to select our seven best. Again, we struggled and even moved some of our prior choices to different categories. We did select seven. The best strategy we could use was to follow the rubric as strictly as possible to keep consistency. The way we went over each work problem twice and talked through them really helped us grasp what was looked for. I hate the rubrics NAEP uses because they are very vague and can be taken different ways. There are too many variables in my opinion.

Listening and watching the other groups first of all made me appreciate the problem we had. You could see when any leeway was given to the rubric how their is confusion on where the problem should go. We thought our rubric was rough but some of the other group's had really awful ones. With multiple sections to look at. I was getting stressed out just observing them. I also know that since we worked so closely with our material it is easy for us to guess where NAEP would have put them but quickly gazing at the other problems we went back and forth a lot with where they could go. This project helps show us as future teachers the importance of having clear criteria for rubrics. Students should not be as confused as we were when seeing a rubric for an assignment or project. With clear expectations no one will feel lost or have too many questions.