Viewbrics: A Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment Method to Mirror and Master Complex Skills with Video-Enhanced Rubrics and Peer Feedback in Secondary Education

Abstract

AbstractTo master complex skills, it is important to practice regularly and to form a mental model of the strived-for skills. If you know for which mastery level you are striving and can mirror performances against this benchmark with help of others, then you can focus on practicing deficient sub-skills to become a ‘master’. Although regular and structured practice is indispensable, secondary schools do often not facilitate this in daily educational practice. We expected that a technology-enhanced formative assessment method with analytic rubrics could support both mental model formation as well as regular practice of students’ skills. However, we further hypothesized that text-based analytic rubrics offer limited capacity to convey contextualized, procedural, time-related and observable behavioral aspects of a complex skill, thus restricting the construction of a rich mental model. We expected that using video-enhanced rubrics, an integration of analytic rubrics with video modeling examples, within a technology-enhanced formative assessment method would lead to a ‘richer’ mental model, improved feedback quality and positive growth in skills performance. Therefore, various stakeholders jointly developed and tested the Viewbrics technology-enhanced formative assessment method with (video-enhanced) rubrics for three generic complex skills, namely presenting, collaborating and information literacy. The Viewbrics method was then piloted by means of a quasi-experimental design (video-enhanced or textual rubric condition and a control group) in 6 classes in two secondary schools. Results show that the structured technology-enhanced formative assessment method had a positive effect on both mental model growth as well as on skills’ mastery levels of students. This effect was independent of the used rubric format (textual or video-enhanced).