Exploring the Mechanism of the Effects of Presenting a Rubric and Fact Patterns

Abstract

In the present study, we investigated the mechanism of the effects of presenting a rubric and fact patterns corresponding to each grading standard. 95 eighth-grade students were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 classrooms, each of which corresponded to an experimental condition. The participants studied mathematics for 5 sessions: at the end of the first day and the third day, the teacher gave a test on that day's lecture. The feedback methods for the test results varied according to each classroom's experimental condition: the rubric condition, the rubric plus fact pattern condition, or the comment-only condition. The results showed that students who received the rubric were more likely to consider that the purpose of the test was to show improvement than those who did not receive the rubric, and the rubric influenced intrinsic motivation, learning strategies, and test scores through values of a test. In addition, the results of this study suggested that informed assessment had an important role in values of test change. The results also revealed that fact patterns had no effect on the dependent variables.