Rubrics can be beneficial if:
- They are discussed beforehand and used on a project where specific criteria must be met.
- Their use is modeled in the classroom before students try using them on their own.
- They are flexible enough to allow for creativity.
Rubrics can stifle if:
- Students do not know how to use them (they will become intimidated by them).
- They do not allow for any deviation and thus provide no room for creativity or higher level thinking.
Below is my annotated bibliography on rubrics for ENC 5705:
RUBRICS: STIFLING OR HELPFUL?
Many educators have debated the idea of utilizing rubrics as learning and assessment tools for teaching writing. While some scholars argue that they constrict student writing, many assert that rubrics are helpful if constructed and used properly. This bibliography focuses on both the disadvantages and benefits of rubrics.
Furthermore, the discourse on rubrics is wide-ranging. Some scholars give advice on how to make rubrics more useful in the classroom and how to construct rubrics so that the expectations are clear and align with the instructor’s pedagogy. Others suggest that students should be afforded the opportunity to collaborate and create the rubric, while others see more benefit in the teachers creating it themselves. Some argue that rubrics constrict creativity, while others assert that rubrics help students engage in metacognitive reflection on their writing. Most critics of the rubric would agree that a rubric is a tool that, if used, must be utilized with thought and caution in the classroom.
Andrade, Heidi Goodrich. “Teaching With Rubrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” College Teaching 53.1 (2005): 27-30. ERIC. Web. 18 Mar. 2011. Published in a peer-reviewed journal, Andrade’s article draws from research and her recent experiences as an assistant professor to review the benefits of using rubrics as teaching and grading tools, and she cautions instructors against approaches that limit rubric effectiveness. Rubrics can orient teachers toward their goals; they help instructors clarify learning goals, convey these goals to students, guide feedback on students’ progress toward the goals, and judge student writing in terms of the degree to which the goals were met. On the other hand, rubrics are not self-explanatory and teachers need to spend time in class discussing the implications of the rubric (even if the students helped create it) and giving the students an opportunity to practice using the rubric before their work is assessed with it. Furthermore, teachers must consider the quality and clarity of their rubrics. She asserts, “Rubrics improve when we compare them to published standards, show them to another teacher, or ask a colleague to coscore some student work” (30). Andrade sees benefit in utilizing rubrics in classrooms of any level (grade school through graduate school) if teachers create and employ them with care.
Chapman, Valerie and M. Duane Inman. “A Conundrum: Rubrics or Creativity/ Metacognitive Development?” Educational Horizons 87.3 (2009): 198-202. Education Full Text. Web. 28 Feb. 2011. Published in Pi Lambda Theta’s professional newsletter, Chapman and Inman’s article draws from the authors’ own observations in the classroom and research from other educators to explain why grading rubrics stifle students if not constructed with caution. While teachers often utilize rubrics in the classroom with the intent to grade fairly, provide guidance, and simplify the grading process, students view rubrics as their way to an A. Thus students are afraid to go beyond the expectations of the rubric for fear that they will get points off, so they rigidly follow the guidelines. As a result of matching their work to a teacher’s template, students are not exercising important skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. For rubrics to be used as effective tools in the classroom, they must be flexible and broad (Chapman and Inman suggest adding “Creativity” as a category on the rubric).
Elbow, Peter. “Do We Need a Single Standard of Value for Institutional Assessment? An Essay Response to Asao Inoue’s ‘Community-based Assessment Pedagogy.” Assessing Writing 11.2 (2006): 81-99. ERIC. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. In this peer-reviewed journal article, Elbow responds to Inoue’s “Community-based Assessment Pedagogy” to question the practice of students assessing each other’s writing. Elbow points out that a rubric, which serves as a single model of good writing, misrepresents the manner in which the value of good writing is socially constructed. He asserts that “if we want to help students learn to read and write better, we need to help them see competing standards as a positive resource for understanding quality—and a testimony to the complexity and diversity both in pieces of writing and in pieces of humanity” (91). Elbow discusses his use of contract grading in which he assesses grades up to a B based on activities (or requirements met), taking into consideration his personal judgments of quality only when assigning A’s.
Inoue, Asao B. “Community-based Assessment Pedagogy.” Assessing Writing 9.3 (2005): 208-38. ERIC. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. In this peer-reviewed journal article, Inoue reveals the results of moving away from teacher-centered assessment and evaluation of student writing to enable students to assess themselves. He explores the benefits of community-based assessment, as defined by Ed White and Brian Huot: “Community-based assessment pedagogy asks students to take control of all the writing and assessment practices of the class, including . . . the creation of assessment criteria, rubrics, and writing assignments” (210). Such benefits include students becoming more reflective, critical, and self-conscious writers. During his three semesters of implementing community-based assessment practices, Inoue found that when students create their own rubric and grade their own writing, they were forced to reflect on their own writing, resulting in metacognitive awareness.
Mabry, Linda. “Writing to the Rubric: Lingering Effects of Traditional Standardized Testing on Direct Writing Assessment.” The Phi Delta Kappan 80.9 (1999): 673-79. JSTOR. Web. 1 March 2011. In her article published in Phi Delta Kappan’s professional journal on education, Mabry presents the rationale educators give for implementing standardized tests and rubrics in secondary education and refutes their reasoning, stating that while rubrics provide reliability in performance assessments, they also standardize writing and the teaching of writing. She suggests that rubrics are “agents of standardization” that make writing assignments resemble the multiple-choice tests they were meant to improve upon (676). She correlates this standardization of writing to a study conducted by Firestone, Fairman, and Mayrowetz. In their study, they evaluated performance assessments in Maine and Maryland and concluded that the states’ attempts to redesign the test and increase reliability actually constrained student options, finding their change from multiple-choice to performance testing superficial rather than conceptual. Mabry cautions educators to stop sending the message that good writing is the sum of the criteria on the rubric.
Martins, David. “Scoring Rubrics and the Material Conditions of Our Relations With Students.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 36.2 (2008): 123-37. Print. In his peer-reviewed journal article, Martins suggests that by viewing rubrics as technology, instructors can “develop rubrics that offer productive opportunities for enriching student-teacher relationships and improving writing instruction” (124). Once a coordinator for Writing Across the Curriculum Program at a large university, Martins originally discouraged his colleagues from scoring guides and rubrics. However, after considering the higher demands for teachers regarding time and class loads and reading Nancy Sommer’s ideas on responding to student writers, he revisited the role of rubrics in the classroom. Through implementing rubrics into his college classrooms, Martins has discovered that when rubrics clearly communicate to students what the instructor expects their writing to do as well as the instructor’s criteria for evaluation, rubrics can be effective teaching and grading tools. He also notes that instructors who implement rubrics need to go over the rubric in class to model how one should utilize the rubric properly when writing. In addition, the teacher should give the students a chance to discuss the rubric in class to clarify for them what the teacher is looking for in the essay, but, more important, to offer students “an opportunity to explore as a class whether [the teacher’s] instruction and [student] efforts match the rubric” (131). Any perceived discrepancy should lead to the instructor altering the rubric. Thus, rubrics combined with planning, reflection, and listening have a chance to become one of many effective ways to engage with students on writing, not just to tell them our expectations on writing.
Reddy, Y. Malini and Heidi Andrade. “A Review of Rubric Use in Higher Education.” Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 35.4 (2010): 435-48. ERIC. Web. 28 Feb. 2011. This peer-reviewed journal article reviews the research conducted on the use of rubrics at the post-secondary level. Two studies—one conducted by Petkov and Petkova and another by Reitmeier, Svendsen, and Vrchota—suggest that rubric use correlates with improved academic performance, while a third study—by Powell—did not support this notion. Furthermore, several studies have demonstrated that rubrics can help identify specific areas for improvement in courses and programs. In other words, rubrics have the potential to act as “instructional illuminators” (qtd. on page 441), or provide feedback to instructors and departments on which skills students have mastered and which they have not. Several studies have suggested that the language used in rubrics is important because it can be more accurately and consistently interpreted by instructors, students, and scorers. Reddy and Andrade end the article by suggesting further research regarding rubrics in the areas of research methodologies, geographical focus, validity and reliability, and the promotion of learning.
Rezaei, Ali Reza and Michael Lovorn. “Reliability and Validity of Rubrics for Assessment Through Writing.” Assessing Writing 15.1 (2010): 18-39. ERIC. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. In this peer-reviewed journal article, Rezaei and Lovorn explain their experiment which was conducted to investigate the reliability and validity of rubrics in assessing college students’ writing. The participants were asked to grade one of the two writing samples. Sample one used correct sentence structure, spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but it did not entirely answer the question. On the other hand, sample two answered the question but contained multiple errors in grammar and punctuation. For each sample, participants were asked to assess the writing samples once without a rubric and once with a rubric. The results suggest that the participants took off points for mechanical characteristics in the writing samples whether or not they used a rubric, thus indicating that using rubrics will not necessarily improve the reliability or validity of assessment unless the graders are well trained on how to design and implement them effectively.
Saddler, Bruce and Heidi Andrade. “The Writing Rubric.” Educational Leadership 62.2 (2004): 48-52. ERIC. Web. 1 March 2011. In their journal article, Saddler and Andrade discuss two writers, a struggling writer (Katie) and a successful writer (Maren), to conclude that clear, accessible instructional rubrics can “provide the scaffolding students need to become self-regulated writers” (49). Unlike assessment rubrics, instructional rubrics are often created with students. Paired with teacher-student conferences and peer assessment, rubrics can help provide useful instruction and feedback on writing in a classroom. In this way, a rubric can help students who are struggling as well as students who are succeeding because it encourages them to navigate the writing process to become self-regulated learners.
Smith, Lois J. “Grading Written Projects: What Approaches Do Students Find Most Helpful?” Journal of Education for Business 83.6 (2008): 325-30. ERIC. Web. 28 Feb. 2011. This article published in a peer-reviewed journal explains Smith’s study to find out what types of assessment feedback students find most helpful. Students in college marketing classes at a public university were given a two-part survey. In the first section, students were asked to indicate their preference among three types of grading methods (a grading matrix [rubric], a paragraph suggesting improvements, and a paragraph of strengths and weaknesses) and to write comments on why they found their preference to be the best grading method. In the second section, students were asked to respond to 11 statements with their level of agreement (using a 5-point Likert-type scale) regarding the students’ reading of comments, statements on grading focus (grammar, spelling, and content), and statements on teachers’ summary comments at the end of papers. Sixty percent of students preferred a grading rubric because they felt it was easier to follow and afforded fairness. Smith concludes that in addition to appreciating a clear rubric, “students appreciate the basics of respect and fairness and attempts at balancing negative criticism with support” (330) and that instructors’ grading time and effort can foster more positive faculty-student interactions if coupled with respect and kindness.
Spence, Lucy K. “Discerning Writing Assessment: Insights into an Analytical Rubric.” Language Arts 87.5 (2010): 337-52. ERIC. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. Spence’s case study, published in a peer-reviewed journal, examines the grading practices of a teacher on the writing of an English learner named Dulce in a grade school. The teacher used a rubric to grade all of her students, and Spence notes that the teacher tended to privilege the rubric over important contextual information during assessment. There were times during grading that the teacher seemed to want to assign Dulce a higher grade due to her strong content, however after quoting from the rubric, she settled on a lower grade. Spence notes that “the rubric’s artificial separation of the traits takes the focus away from the meaning the child is communicating through personal experience brought to bear on a topic” (342). Spence concludes that rubrics should be carefully reviewed prior to implementation to determine what it will reveal and conceal in student writing. For instance, will the rubric allow the teacher to assess English learners in a way that helps them “grow as writers [as opposed to] hold[ing] them to an accountability standard that was designed for native speakers when they are not yet ready” (345)?
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