Educational rubrics, the paper grader's equivalent of to-do
lists, significantly reduce the time you have to spend assessing
and grading student writing. (Unclear about what a rubric is?
Click to learn how to define
rubric.)
However, to get suitable writing rubrics to use during the school
year, you have to do some upfront work to fit
them to your classes and your overall writing writing assessment
strategy.
You may be able to adapt someone else’s evaluation form
to your situation, but it’s unlikely that you can use it
for your writing assessments without changes.
It's better to make your own rubrics and not at all difficult
using your word processor's tables function. Fortunately, the
time needed for creating
rubrics to order is very small compared to the amount of work
they will save you.
An aside: The educational use of rubric has not found
its way into many standard dictionaries. Use a term like grading
form, evaluation guide or even matrix
instead when talking to students or parents.
The rubrics also don’t eliminate the need to write personal
comments. You still need to respond to the student in a
one-to-one way.
Let rubrics keep you from burnout
A convenient time to prepare writing rubrics
is when you are preparing your
year's goals and objectives. It is much easier to judge how
strenuous your academic program is going to be if you spell out
in black on white how much grading you have to do to accomplish
it.
For example, if you have 17 grammar rules you want students to
observe in their writing, you need to put each one of them on
your assessment rubric.
After you do that, estimate how many students you will have to
teach. Teaching 17 grammar rules x 130 students x 1 essay every
two weeks = nervous exhaustion by November.
It's much preferable to teach two grammar rules to 130 students
so that each of those 130 students regularly apply those two rules
in their writing.
To learn how to list specific goals in your writing rubrics,
look at a persuasive
essay rubric I created for one of my classes.
Assign points to writing components
The second step in preparing your rubrics is to identify what
you will consider competent writing in a specific class
and assign point values to its components.
Isn’t competent writing the same everywhere?
Yes — and no.
We might be able to agree in general terms on what is acceptable
writing — like correct spelling, for example — but the
precise writing standards that apply when writing a chemistry
lab report don’t apply to a newspaper editorial or a limerick.
More important, the standard by which you judge the competence
of a seventh grader are not likely to be the same as those you
use when evaluating the work of college sophomores.
Using a grading guide should also keep you from correcting student
papers. Correcting
is the students’ work, not yours. You may point
out between one and three significant errors
in the student’s writing, but you should not correct or edit
their work.
Finally, a rubric should keep you honest. Most of us try
not to be influenced too much by the names on the papers. I find,
though, that when I’m tired, everybody’s grade drops.
I rely on my evaluation guides to keep me from grading my students
harshly just because I feel crabby.
Besides using writing rubrics as grading guides, you can use
them to teach students how to monitor their own work.
What they do for themselves, you don't have to do for them.
And that, my friends, is how using writing rubrics really saves
you time.
