Essay on Analyzing Student Verbal and Written Assignment

There is no doubt that a good teacher should be able not only to teach students how to read and comprehend texts, write high-quality essays and present speeches, but a teacher should also be able to assess objectively students’ work. The main goal of current essay is to develop two scoring rubrics, which would allow to assess students’ verbal presentations and their written assignments. In our case students have been given an assignment to compare several cultures from different parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. The comparison should be done according to following aspects: Politics, Society, the Arts, Nutrition, Economics and Ethnicity. In order to get ready for this assignment, students had to prepare verbal presentations, accompanied by written reports. So, teachers’ task at this point is to assess both verbal presentations and writing skills of every person. For this reason it is necessary to develop a rubric according to which students’ work would be assessed. A rubric will consist of two main components. The first scoring component will deal with different levels of student’s performance. For example, if performance met the standard and teacher’s expectations, a student would receive 100%. If it was below, a student would receive 99% and lower depending on how good or bad a presentation was. Students who fulfilled the task and added some elements that were not required, for example, visual materials (pictures, schemes, tables and etc) may get up to 110% for their work. This would mean that students’ work exceeded teacher’s expectations. Assessing performance will include assessing students’ work in general, not taking into consideration the length and the content of presentation. Second scoring component will consist of five major elements, including content of presentations, amount of sources used, length of presentations, students’ ability to answer teacher’s and classmates’ questions and style of speaking. Each of these elements should be estimated separately, and grade 1-20% should be put for every element. Then, five elements will be summed up and a student will get up to 100% for the presentation. A simple average of the two scoring components will reflect students’ verbal presentation.

After assessing verbal presentations it is necessary to assess students’ written reports as well. A rubric used to estimate written reports will also consist of two major components. The first scoring component will be similar to the one used for assessing verbal presentations; it will deal with three levels of performance of written reports. Students will get 100% if they fulfilled all the requirements, below 100% – if something is omitted, and up to 110% if their work exceeded teacher’s expectations. The second scoring component will assess five major aspects of students’ written reports, including: correct grammar and mechanics, content of the paper, length, accuracy of execution and presence of all necessary elements (introduction, thesis statement, body and conclusion). For every element students will get up to 20% percent each (maximum of 100% will be given to students, whose reports meet all the requirements). A final grade for written reports will be counted by means of simple average between the two elements.

So, for verbal presentation and written reports students will receive two separate grades reflecting their work.

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