Many English Language Arts teachers, like myself are familiar with using rubrics to evaluate student papers and projects. I have dedicated countless hours “perfecting” rubrics, as I am sure you all have as well. With this dedication, comes some confidence that the four boxes on the activity are a useful and effective tool to assist student learning. However, is that confidence founded?
In her article, “Using a Rubric does NOT Ensure Student Learning,” Starr Sackstein cautions teachers to not be complacent with their rubric usage. Rubrics, whether they are checklists or boxes or other graphic organizers, certainly work to make it learning targets and outcomes clear. However, do they lock us teachers into a figurative and literal box?
One change I have made this year, as inspired by edcamps and the twittersphere is to put the rubric at the top of the page, as opposed to the bottom. On some assignments, I put it at the top AND bottom. By putting the rubric first, students have a clear purpose and focus for the task at hand. It also channels my feedback to be directly tied to the learning target that the students are practicing.
On the other hand, on occasion, the wording of the rubric restrains me from assessing a nuance of student performance that I did not predict. On a recent practice of making inferences, my students made several predictions. While predictions are in the same thinking family as infer, they are merely cousins and not exactly inferring. As I began marking boxes on the infer rubric, I felt my hands were tied to effectively use the rubric at hand to address the common confusion my learners had between predicting and inferring. While I certainly addressed the confusion the next day in class and did some re-teaching, I found the rubric lacking in helping me address this concern. This experience led me to a few conclusions about rubrics:
- They are certainly neat and helpful in focusing student learning and teacher assessing.
- They require the teacher to be mindful of the delicate balance between vague and specific wording.
- They are more effective when used as a guide that students use to self-assess.
- They are best used to direct evaluation of the academic learning at hand (such as infer) and not work habits (such as collaboration).
Especially since many of us don’t count formative assessments as a contribution to final grades, why do we need to score every rubric ourselves? What if we simply wrote specific feedback or circled words on the rubric and then asked learners to score themselves? Wouldn’t this change “rubrics cube” from a sometimes confusing, constraining mess of numbers and words to a useful tool to foster the learning feedback loop?
On the other side of the “rubrics cube” is Megan. She has worked to fit her standards into rubrics and each attempt leads to the same frustration. After writing her standards and building sound assessments, she has written rubrics to evaluate the proficiency of her students’ learning. They are either too general or too specific, missing possible outcomes produced by students. Not that students are creating new and unheard of mathematical errors, but that the value of each error should be weighed differently and collectively over the entire assessment. One missed negative sign or minor arithmetic error may not mean the student is not proficient on a particular standard. However, how is that written into a rubric? For Megan, rubrics were too restrictive and rather than guiding the learning and self assessment rubrics, they got in the way of a holistic evaluation of student learning where both skills and conceptual understanding came together.
What are your thoughts about rubrics? How have you used them in the past? What concerns do you have about rubrics?
Share you comments and thoughts below, email Aric and Megan at stemflowerlc@gmail.com or visit stemandflowerlearning.com.
Share you comments and thoughts below, email Aric and Megan at stemflowerlc@gmail.com or visit stemandflowerlearning.com.
Starr’s article can be found at:
STEM and Flower Learning Consultants
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