How are students assessed in an interdisciplinary unit?
This is a common concern of interdisciplinary teams. In units at the middle and high school levels, students will be producing assessment products that incorporate multiple disciplines at once. It is easy to become confused about who should grade what. Often, what happens is that a student will produce an essay, and the team assigns the writing and grammar grade to the language arts teacher, while the grade for content and analysis is given by whoever’s teaching the other discipline represented in the essay. This kind of grading by default can send a bad message to kids: “You don’t have to have good grammar and writing skills in science; those only matter in language arts, and your science grade rests on the content and analysis.” If you are teaching an interdisciplinary unit, the last thing you want to do is segregate the disciplines all over again by how you grade! Develop a rubric that gives a clear definition of the grading criteria for all assessments. The rubric should apply to a
