Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions of the Usability and Usefulness of the first Viewbrics-prototype: a Methodology and Online Tool to Formatively Assess Complex Generic Skills with Video-Enhanced Rubrics (VER) in Dutch Secondary Education

To learn complex generic (21st century) skills students need to form a mental model of a skill. If students know their current and strived-for mastery level, they can better determine subsequent learning activities towards skills mastery. Rubrics support students in self-assessment of their skills as they provide textual descriptions of skills’ mastery levels with performance indicators for all constituent subskills. However, text-based rubrics have a limited capacity to support the formation of mental models of a complex skill. Video-enhanced rubrics (VER) with video modeling examples have the potential to improve and enrich mental model formation. VER can also be used to improve feedback quality a student receives from teachers, experts and peers while practicing a skill. Both affordances of VER can thus improve students’ performance.
In the Viewbrics-project we therefore develop, through design-based research, a methodology for the formative assessment of complex skills with Video-Enhanced Rubrics (VER), precipitated in an online tool. We implemented this methodology in the online tool for three skills: collaborating, presenting and becoming information literate. This paper describes the features of the first prototype of the online tool and the results of a stakeholder evaluation of its perceived usefulness and usability, by means of a questionnaire and card-sorting exercise, with 7 teachers and 21 students of two secondary schools.
The evaluation of this first prototype showed that both teachers and students evaluated the online tool and formative assessment methodology as handy, usable, helpful and feasible for learning complex skills, although some recommendations were made to further improve the design of the tool.