Tips for Assessing Culture Indicators

FAQ 1: How do you assess mastery of culture indicators?

*I think these kinds of indicators naturally lend themselves to open-ended
questions in which students write their answers out in English.
*Another idea is to use alternative forms of assessment (e.g., Michael Rabin's
Hispanic Heritage project) to assess mastery of a particular indicator or set of
indicators.

FAQ 2: How do you evaluate responses to these culture questions/tasks in a

standardized way?
*One helpful resource is the MC 5-point culture rubric for Spanish levels 1-2
(included under the rubrics section of the “Assessing and Tracking” page of our
site: http://www.dcflresources.com/?page_id=72)

High points of this rubric

*Easily Trackable: Since the rubric scores student performance on a 5-point
scale, mastery is easy to determine. In this case, a student would achieve
mastery with any response that reached a 4 or above on this rubric.
*Time-saving: Although it's not perfect, I'd have to say it's far better to use this
rubric for short answer culture questions or projects than to have to make your
own rubric from scratch!
*Helps Teacher Focus on What's Most Important: These rubrics are geared
toward assessing students' ability to identify products/processes from Spanish-
speaking countries as well as the perspectives behind those processes/products.
To learn about MC's interpretation of cultural processes/products, please
reference the attached rubric.

Here is an example of a nicely aligned set of questions for the culture indicator
“"Identify and describe a typical story or song that a child from a Spanish-
speaking country would know":

Identify:
Question 1) "Which of the following is NOT a typical story that a child from
a Spanish-speaking country would know?"
A) La llorona
B) The Legend of Poinsettia
C) The Virgin of Guadalupe
D) Los pollitos

Describe
Question 2:
Part A) "In 3-4 sentences, identify and retell a typical story that a child from
a Spanish-speaking country would know
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Part B) "In 2 sentences, explain why the story you discussed in part A is
culturally significant"
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