As the power of digital assessments continues to enable improvements and innovations in education, one aspect we are excited about is how assessment technology platforms can enable more robust scoring practices including tools for greater accuracy, efficiency, and collaboration.
Collaborative Scoring has been increasingly recognized for its value as a teacher professional development tool, as well as for its benefits to generating more authentic and nuanced views of students’ knowledge and skills. When teachers work together to evaluate student performance, the pedagogical value of assessment is enhanced, and educators develop deeper levels of assessment literacy.
MZD began a partnership with the Michigan Assessment Consortium (MAC) with the goal of creating a performance assessment system that made collaborative scoring a key component.
Working with educators from across the state of Michigan the MAC developed a rich catalog of over 360 K-12 performance tasks focused in the areas of dance, music, theatre, and visual arts. Through the collaboration with MZD a truly unique performance assessment scoring technology platform, OSCAR Classroom, was born.
OSCAR Classroom was designed by MZD to enable educator collaborative scoring that facilitates meaningful measurements of student learning, that is easy to deploy and integrate with existing assessment practices. With a bank of rich content and a technology platform that focuses on educators and the importance of collaborative scoring, the OSCAR Classroom platform is a powerful tool enabling collaborative scoring at the state, district or school level.
Why is collaborative scoring important?
In its newly released article “What is Collaborative Scoring? Why Can It Be So Valuable?” the MAC has created a great resource detailing the value of collaborative scoring (read more here). To summarize:
- Teachers are exposed to high-quality work created by students outside of their classroom
- Teachers can, in real-time, assess their potential bias or different understandings of scoring rubrics used to evaluate their students (MZD on the consistency in grading practices)
- A dialog is opened between teachers that may never have occurred if not for scoring each other’s student work
- Collaborative scoring provides educators with job embedded professional learning
- Most importantly, the process ensures students are being assessed consistently across a state, district, or school
Is collaborative scoring possible in my district?
Listen in on one of these upcoming conference sessions that MZD is delivering with MAC to learn more about how collaborative scoring has been implemented in systems across the country.
Building a Better Assessment Future Virtual Conference
Using Collaborative Scoring to Affordably Implement Performance Assessment at the State, District, and School Levels
CCSSO 2021 National Conference on Student Assessment
Implementing reliable performance assessment systems with educator involvement in creation, implementation and collaborative scoring (at scale)
