Writing assessment rubrics
All need 5 key components

 

Assessment rubrics you use in teaching writing need five components to assure your evaluations are on target. Leave any one out of your writing rubric and you'll make grading writing more difficult for yourself. Who needs to make grading papers any harder?

Remember, writing assessment should focus on the writing skills you want students to be able use by year's end. Assessing what students know about any component of the writing process may give a totally skewed picture of what their writing skills actually are.

1) Identification of the writing situation for which it is used.

You might have one rubric for writing done in class in a period and another for writing done outside class, when students theoretically have more time to spend.

Grading papers is easier if your assessment rubric is geared to the specific type of writing you are evaluating. I have different rubrics for work that follows the persuasive essay pattern and for work that uses a narrative format, since these are organized very differently.

Not only can I check things off in a genre-specific rubric, but students can use the rubrics as self-assessment guides.

2) Elements the written piece must include.

A rubric for evaluating a three-paragraph essay wouldn’t have the same list of elements as a rubric for evaluating a term paper.

Your rubric should be detailed enough to serve as a checklist for students preparing their writing.

Giving the students the rubric before they write not only lets them assess their own work, but eliminates complaints that they didn't know your grading standards.

3) Standards for mechanical competence in that class.

Your rubrics should indicate your standard of acceptable spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.

Work that is not up to your standard for mechanical competence should not get an A no matter how good the writing is in other respects.

Believe me, students who consider themselves A students will work on their writing mechanics if those errors are all that keep them from earning A's.

4) Total points possible for various components of the writing.

Research shows that if you want student to become good writers, you have to grade them primarily on the content of their writing. That means grading on

• Students' ideas,

• The development of those ideas,

• The clarity with which they express those ideas.

By stipulating how many of the points possible you will award to the content itself and how much to the mechanical components, you keep yourself focused on the content as you grade.

Typically, you should assign no more than 30% of the total points on a paper to writing mechanics.

5) A place for comments about one thing the student could do to improve the next paper.

Help students focus on something they can do to improve their grade on the next paper.

If possible, give two suggestions: