Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Grading Rubrics

With my return to the U.S. school system this year, after being overseas for 11 yrs and a stay at home mom for 2 yrs, I have been inundated with rubric requirements and requests. I teach high school science and at my current school (private independent) the students have become so dependent on getting rubrics that they can not think for themselves about what they need to do to complete simple assignments.

For example, I had my grade 9 biology students make a poster, the directions stated: put your photos in order, label them and give a description of the phase that they show. (we were talking about cellular reproduction)

There was such uproar that I didn't give a rubric it was amazing! Parents of the students insisted that my directions were unclear and that if I had given a rubric they would have done better etc etc etc. However, my response was, the rubric would have included no more information than the directions: put the photos in order, label them, describe each phase.

So, I think that in cases where there is a lot of detail and parts to an assignment they are useful teaching/assessing tools, but I am not a huge fan of them because the students become so dependent on them that they can't decide for themselves what would make an assignment good any longer without them.

I've been reading all the responses and really trying to think this through, but the statement above really summarizes what I keep coming back to. I can see where rubrics can be beneficial in some ways, but at the same time, I see it becoming a crutch. The latest one DS has is very detailed - for a top grade, the project will answer at least 13 questions, it will be neatly written or typed, report is in paragraph format and in complete sentences, answers have little/no mistakes in punctuation, spelling or grammar, and so on. For the next lower grade, the project will answer at least *10* questions, report is paragraph format with *some* complete sentences, etc... And it goes on from there.

In our personal experience - I see the rubric as...limiting(?) in that DS probably won't go above and beyond what's expected of whatever grade he wants to get. However, without it, he'd do his project, receive his grade and (hopefully) learn from the critiques/criticisms of his teacher and apply them to the next project. I think he'd internalize that experience more than looking at a checklist and making sure he's included them all. And then, of course, there's the question of what happens when he doesn't have a rubric?

I hear you JDax as my DS will only ever do the "minimum". I don't find the fault in the rubric idea but in the writing of it in the manner you describe. I would rather the top grade say something along the lines of "Thoroughly describes the project and gives many examples that support the findings" or something along those lines. Something that allows both the teacher AND the student some room to make an evaluation based on the student's individual abilities yet is still objective enough for grading purposes.

Breakaway, I agree with what you say about the style of the writing. In my experience though when a teacher is required to give a rubric it needs to be specific and detail exactly what is required to get each number grade for each category. However, if you give more broad statements like what you've described, it is called criterion marking. The difference is just what you described - criteria allow teachers the flexibility to differentiate between 13 ok sentences and 13 super sentences describing the topic.
I love to use criteria, but do not like using rubric, mainly because it almost forces kids to do more than the minimum just to ensure that they get the top grades. However, most of the parents at my school can not deal with the ambiguity of criteria and pressure teachers for rubrics instead. (I think it is a control factor - they then can control exactly what their child produced and know what grade they will receive before handing it in.)
I could go on and on about this, since it is one of my frustrations as a teacher trying to teach critical thinking skills and scientific reasoning, but will spare you all my rantings and stop here.

Ok, I'm just posting because I see where people are coming from when they say rubrics are limiting, and I just realized why my perspective is so different...

It's great not to limit in the way that rubrics limit, but I think than in actual practice, all teachers do limit in these ways... the rubric just makes that transparent. I could never "guess" which things the teacher was going to mark for, and so I often got really bad marks for work that teachers at a higher level would have recognized with a higher mark. (Eg, a poem that I wrote in Grade 8 to be sent to a competition was failed by the teacher, but published as the first page of the competition anthology.)

Anyway, I think that if a student needs encouragement to go beyond the basics of an assignment, that's a separate issue from the question of "hitting the mark," which is what I would say rubrics are for. Maybe getting the student to come up with their own rubric for "I'll feel this project was useful to me if... very useful if... exciting if...." and then try to meet both standards at once.

My 14 yr old tutoree is so used to being bored in school that the hardest part of any project for her is to identify a way to make it useful to her. Once she ids what would make it "exciting," she's off to the races.

In my observation and experience, transparency is key to understanding whether grading practices are uniformly applied. Rubrics make it plain to see whether each pupil's work is graded on the same criteria.

While grading assignments "blind" (without knowing which pupil's work is being graded) precludes favoring or penalizing any pupil's work and may be the ideal, rubrics cannot guarantee that degree of fairness.

The opposite of grading "blind" is establishing different grading criteria depending upon the student. The transparency provided by grading criteria being documented in a rubric may help shed light on any grading practices utilizing "differentiated task demands" designed to create equal outcomes.