Oral+Presentation+Rubric+Assessment


 * Teaching Development **
 * Assessing Oral Presentation Rubric **

Oral presentations have been used in the fourth year //Environmental Biology of Fishes// course as a **formative** use of assessment in response to the question: "//**How can we help students improve?**//"

In the past, I have struggled with designing a valid set of performance criteria which would capture the student's true level of knowledge, reasoning, performance skills and academic achievement and which would be as objective as possible so as not to incorporate biases into the assessment process.

In a previous study, the rationale for using oral presentation as a valid performance-based assessment tool were reflected, the reasons for this form of assessment based on the University of Guelph Learning Objectives were given as links, student outcomes were defined, the achievement targets were described, the performance criteria were developed, the assessment task was presented in a rubric and the five quality standards were reflected on. Refer to performance assessment task: oral presentations for background information.

In this investigation, the oral presentation rubric was assessed for its objective criteria. If the rubric was an effective assessment tool, both students and instructor should have the same outcomes when scoring oral presentations.
 * Investigation: Assessing the usefulness of the oral presentation rubric. Does it assess students objectively? **
 * To test this, students [Environmental Biology of Fishes, ZOO*4330 Winter semester 2005] were asked to self-score their oral presentation.
 * The scoring criteria for the oral presentation was available to students on a rubric.[[image:mrbuttn.gif width="25" height="14" link="file:Rubric2005.xls"]]
 * The rubric was broken down into the following categories: Introduction, Background, Focus, Presentation Skills, Discussion, Assessing Colleagues and summation of all presentation components.
 * Both students and instructor scored the oral presentation using the rubric.


 * Statistical analysis used: ANOVA: one factor and the Paired T-test.
 * Results of the investigation revealed no significant difference in scores for presentation components: Introduction, Background, Focus, Presentation Skills or Discussion.
 * For the presentation category: assessing colleagues, a significant difference was revealed at p=0.01 level.
 * Observation: the students tended to score lower then the instructor for this category.

**Outcome**: The oral presentation rubric contains elements of objectivity. However, further refinement of the Assessing Colleagues category is needed to make the oral presentation rubric a truly objective tool for assessing student presentations.

<span style="color: #006cff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">marie Thérèse Rush, First published in July 12, 2005 <span style="color: #006cff; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Originally published in the University of Guelph - Dept. Zoology website [www.uoguelph.ca/zoology/... However, this website was removed in December 2013.


 * <span style="background-color: #c7faf9; color: #0740a2; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Action Research Project: Initiated in 2004. Follow-up investigation in 2005 by marie Thérèse Rush, Laboratory instructor, Department of Integrative Biology, College of Biological Science, University of Guelph. ||

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