How to Evaluate High School Projects

There are many ways to evaluate high school projects. Because projects at this level are more labor-intensive and involve multiple concepts, rubrics and learning checklists are the best ways to evaluate student work. Using these tools allows teachers to communicate with students where the strengths of a project lie, what worked well in specific criteria areas, what was lacking and what they might improve upon the next time. Using a rating system to evaluate high school projects provides students with important, individualized feedback.

Instructions

Evaluation

1. Review all of the projects in one area. Lay them out, or preview them displayed in a room without grading them, just to gain an overall understanding of how directions were followed, as well as a sense for amount and degree of the quality--high quality, medium quality, low or poor quality. This will help you develop a framework for whether and how they understood directions and if enough time was provided for completion.

2. Develop a rubric with criteria at each juncture along a numbered continuum across the top with a scale from low to high, or 1 to 5. Write the criteria up along the left-hand side to cover at least six project expectations. For example, if it is a mathematics project, include all skills areas that needed to be reflected in the project. If it was a history project, include aspects of historical content that needed to be reflected. Use a rubric maker online, such as www.rubricain.com, or create one yourself using a simple Word document or Excel.

3. Develop a learning checklist with specific descriptors that detail and measure each aspect of criteria required in the project. Learning checklists convey project expectations and operate similar to rubrics, but don't result in a single score or use gradations.

4. Check off all the areas of completion on the learning checklist, or add up all of the scoreable areas on the rubric if that was used. For example, a student might have received a 5 in content criteria, and a 3 in skills-related area. Indicate the score on the rubric and and paper clip it to the project. If a learning checklist was used, attach that.

5. Provide each student with individual feedback on a Post-it note or somewhere else on the project. Include encouraging comments, as well as some evaluative ones to keep students feeling good about their work while making them aware of what they might do differently the next time. Author Grant Wiggins, in On Assessing Learning (1993), recommends that we evaluate students less, and give them feedback more.

Tips & Warnings

• Avoid writing on student projects. It is their art, and hopefully they worked hard on it. Leaving it as is, without marks or writing, allows them to showcase it beyond the classroom.

• Share learning checklists and rubrics with students prior to the completion of their projects so that they understand what the expectations are. Involving them in the creation of the rubrics makes it more meaningful (Reeves, 2008).

References

• New Horizons for Learning: Assessment as Feedback

Resources

• On Assessments for Learning