Benefits of Rubrics, and some tips and tricks

At a recent Instructional Leadership Team Institute convened by the Network for College Success Camille Farrington led a discussion of rubrics.  While the Network's focus is on school-wide rubrics for member schools' Targeted Instructional Areas, much of the conversation was relevant to the assessment we talk about at the EASL Institute.

Good things come from Rubrics

Workshop practitioners came up with a quick list of positive outcomes derived from using rubrics:

• Consistent standards for all students;
• Transparency: our expectations are clear
• Stress reduction: good rubrics take the personalities out of assessment;
• Students understand the goals with a clearly written rubric;
• Rubrics can lead to rich, formative discussion in class;
• Consistency can help lead to data on student success, thus playing a formative role in our teaching.

Rubrics for All vs Rubrics for Everything

When we stress the importance of using rubrics so that all students see how we will know what they know and evaluate it, sometimes teachers feel they need to create rubrics for every piece of evidence a student provides.  This is both unnecessary and counterproductive! Not all evidence is so formally evaluated; many times we use informal assessments to "take the temperature" of the classroom--is the main point getting through, or is confusion the dominant situation?  Given the demands on teachers' planning and time, it's more important to get frequent feedback loops between student and teacher than to have worked out rubrics for each relatively informal assessment.

Scale up

Both students and teachers need to learn to work with rubrics. It's better to begin with a simple, clear and concise rubric defining proficiency and high performance for one outcome, and then to scale up to more complex rubrics which might deal with a substantial project encompassing several outcomes as both students and teachers become comfortable with working with rubrics.

Time for Practice

Assessing student work against rubrics is a skill that can be sharpened with practice.  One way to gain experience is to develop a rubric for already-existing student work, and then use the rubric to reevaluate the work.  A rubric does not exist in a vacuum, and as it is used the ways to refine it will become clear.

An opportunity to model

We don't often spontaneously review and revise our own work, and sometimes it's a struggle to convince students that doing so is a good thing.  In working with rubrics, it can be useful to be transparent with students when revisions to a rubric become necessary.  We can hope that students will see that such editing works to their advantage as assessment becomes more conscious and more closely tied to the articulated course outcomes.

Potential pitfalls and challenges

At the workshop, practitioners raised challenges for which they needed to prepare:

• When assessing concepts which spiral in complexity from grade level to grade level, how are rubrics maintained to support the process from grade to grade?
• How can we use rubrics across content areas when students are working on interdisciplinary projects?
• How can we use the data of student performance as assessed with rubrics to improve both teaching and learning (and to improve the rubrics themselves)?
• How can we teach students to work with rubrics effectively?  How do we develop exemplars?
• Solving the problem of inter-rater reliability, so that we sync up the assessments between teachers and over time?
• Given the realities of teachers' work, how do we find the time to look at student work carefully against rubrics?
• Given the realities of high stakes testing, how do we align rubrics with the tests while supporting authentic classroom goals?
• How can we work with rubrics to make appropriate accommodations to students with special needs?

 Rubrics: A Tool for Transparency

In the end, rubrics are another tool to let students know what they are expected to learn and how their learning will be evaluated.  By making both the development and implementation of rubrics transparent, we will enhance both teaching and learning.