Chapter VIII: Criteria & Validity. (Wiggins & McTighe , 2005)

As we have been studying the book “Understanding by Design” by the authors mentioned above, we have been realizing, step by step, the different elements and key concepts that undoubtedly have become really important to our own awareness of evaluation and assessment.
In this chapter called “Criteria and Validity”, the authors discuss and give lots of tips about how we as teachers have to be aware of the importance of different types of assessment, specifically the ones which are not based just in correct or incorrect answers (objective tests), but the ones which the evaluation is guided by an appropriate criteria. This brings the question that at the moment of having evaluations based on students’ performances, in what criteria do teachers support these evaluations? This is a huge subject because is not that easy for an assessor to test and assess according to what he thinks is correct or not. The things is that in order to assess students’ understanding is central to have criteria and formulate rubrics for its further assessment. By rubrics we mean a set of instructions where an assessor relies on and supports the evaluation. At the same time, rubrics describe degrees of quality, proficiency or understanding along a continuum (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). According to the authors there exist two general types of rubrics: holistic and analytic. The holistic one is intended to evaluate a general view of a task, in opposition to the analytical one which is based on particular areas or “traits” that gives different scores in different areas.
Having these issues in mind is important to clarify something. As a matter of fact, having rubrics for assessing students’ performance become fundamental in the way that teachers should be as clear as possible at the moment to explain students the way they are going to be evaluated. This sounds common sense but one thing is to have clear rubrics based on any standard criteria to evaluate and the other is to not inform students by what rubric they will be evaluated in the future.
At the moment of having a rubric of evaluation, we need to think that it is important to have support and reliability. As we have already seen in the previous chapter the need for having fair judgment from evidences founded from the assessment, general judgment is central to the purpose of being accurate at the moment of giving marks. Rubrics are grounded by validity as well. If validity measures what is supposed to measure, rubrics depend also on the criteria of what is supposed to be focus on at the moment of judging if students did well or not in a particular area. And this brings the concept of reliability as the confidence the assessor should have in the rubrics guided by credible patterns and clear trends (2005).
Finally, it is fundamental that teachers should be really aware of all these issues at the moment of assessing and judging students’ works or performances. It becomes essential that evaluative processes take into consideration not only the theoretical part of the assessment but the interest and ongoing learning from students.

Wiggins, P., McTighe, J. Understanding by Design. Chapter VIII. 2005.

Chapter III: Gaining Clarity for Our Goals. (Wiggins & McTighe , 2005)

As teachers is really important to know how and what to design for our students. At the same time, this process has multiples desired goals. However they are not as easy to understand as we think they are. So, In order to gain clarity on goals, as this chapter suggests, I would like to discuss one of the main ideas exposed in this chapter. This idea has to do with the Establishment of Goals. Why is it really important to have goals as clear as possible for both teachers and students? This is the answer we should aim for on this idea.

To begin with, learning goals can be defined as “the content standards or learning outcomes that specify what students should know and be able to do in various disciplines” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). What the authors suggest here is that at the moment of design goals in a program or course, we should go the national curricula in order to have more evidence on what direction we should set these goals. Here we may have problems with the content standards because sometimes these are too big, small, and vague (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), or even they do not fit in the reality students are. And that is not our purpose if we want to have students learning meaningfully. For example, if teachers teach equations without a clear objective or an explanation of what they are intended to be taught. So, it is commonly said by students: what are we learning something that we are not going to apply in our daily life? That is why establishing goals become so important to be understood by teachers and students.

Now, how do we avoid teaching students these problems? This is answered by prioritizing content standards “identifying the big idea and core tasks within them” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). The purpose of this is to have a bunch of big ideas by which students can get to the center of it. The prioritization should be done by the teacher from this “easy to follow” information given to students. This is like doing conceptual maps, and then they have to construct their knowledge analyzing and comparing the information in order to focus their understanding.


Finally, the importance of having challenging tasks to be developed because “authentic challenges involve realistic situations, where the context of the task is as faithful as possible to real-world opportunities and difficulties” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). That is to say challenges become part of the prioritization of the objectives and it allows knowledge and skills to be developed further. As always, to be challenging students become a great deal in their process of learning.

Wiggins, P., McTighe, J. Understanding by Design. Chapter III. 2005.