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.
