Rubrics: Not Just an Assessment Tool,
but an Engagement Tool used for Learning.
Last year I had a class of 17 boys and 7 girls as first graders. This year I have those students again as second graders as I am looping with them. The class has a few changes, some students have moved out and new students have moved in. The sensed need I have for my students this year is to be more engaged in their writing. I want my students to have ownership in their learning and be “in charge” of their writing. They need to apply what they learn from the mini-lessons and work to make their writing better. With research, my goal is to refine my teaching practice and enhance my instruction in writing through: the development of my writing curriculum, clearly defining the classroom environment during writing time, and the use of assessment for learning.
I first began my research based on the question how can I foster my students to be more engaged during writing? To move forward, I needed to clarify what it meant for students to be engaged. I had my own vision of it, but I wasn’t clear about how to define it, and I didn’t realize that there were so many resources available on the concept. Through my reading and research, I found definitions of student engagement can be defined as: “time-on-task”; students’ willingness to participate in routine school activities such as attending classes, submitting required work, and following teachers’ directions in class; participating in the activities offered as part of the school program. Other definitions are focused on cognitive, behavioral and affective indicators of student engagement in specific learning tasks and sustained behavioral involvement in learning activities accompanied by a positive emotional tone. According to the article Assessing Student Engagement Rates, “When students are engaged they select tasks at the border of their competencies, initiate action when given the opportunity, and exert intense effort and concentration in the implementation of learning tasks; they show generally positive emotions during ongoing action, including enthusiasm, optimism, curiosity, and interest. ” (Chapman, 2003). The opposite of engagement is disaffection. The definition of student engagement had a perfect correlation to my sensed need. Getting students more engaged in their writing tasks will support my vision and philosophy of teaching and learning.
Next, I wanted to learn how rubrics fell into my vision of teaching and learning. I began using rubrics last year for reading, math, writing, and for defining behavior expectations. I was amazed by how the students responded to the rubrics in a positive way. The students were excited to know they could get a certain score on an assignment based on what they did or how they met the criteria. The positive responses and outcomes I received from students about rubrics, made me want to know more. How can rubrics engage students? How can rubrics support student learning? How can I implement them into my classroom on a more regular basis? My research would help me answer these questions.
I read books and professional articles covering a wide range of rubric use and found positive learning outcomes for students who helped create and interact with rubrics. The research shows evidence of how rubrics support thinking, learning, understanding, and instruction (Andrade, Want, Du & Akawi, 2009). Rubrics actively engage students and help them construct knowledge. Rubrics are not merely a tool used to grade a final product; they are assessment as learning. It was clear to me through all of my research, that learning in the form of rubrics can lead students to self-assess their work and develop metacognition skills.
The evidence found in my research could help me implement ways to actively engage my students in the writing process and to enhance and drive my instruction. The use of rubrics could support the design for my writing curriculum, help foster a more positive learning environment during my writing block, and design quality authentic assessment by showing students how to create their own rubrics and become self-assessors of their writing.
Rubrics at work
Student-created rubrics are essentially a form of a student-centered classroom assessment, which are assessment tools that allow students to take responsibility for their own achievement from initial phases of learning. With student centered rubrics, students and the teacher share a vision of success and they become partners in reaching a goal of academic success. To reach a goal of academic success through student-centered assessments one must remember that students are the assessment users, high quality assessments must be created, and assessments are used for teaching and learning as students become partners with their teacher and their peers in the assessment process (Andrade , Wang, Du & Akawi, 2009).
Student-created rubrics follow the same type of creation guidelines as student-centered assessments (with some variations) and they are actually considered a type of student-centered classroom assessment. When looking at the necessary steps taken to guide students in building a rubric (also called an Instructional Rubric), it is clear that rubrics support teaching and promote thinking and learning. According to the article Rubric-Referenced Self-Assessment and Self-Efficacy for Writing, the authors present studies that demonstrate engaging students in generating and using criteria “increases student motivation, confidence, and achievement” and that self-assessments which focus student attention on particular aspects of their performance contribute to positive self-efficacy beliefs (Andrade, Want, Du & Akawi, 2009).
Students who are involved in creating a rubric and use it to assess themselves, will learn more because, they are engaged in higher-order thinking skills. Student created rubrics, require students to manipulate information and ideas in ways that transforms their meaning and impacts their work. This transformation occurs when students combine facts and ideas in order to synthesize, generalize, explain, hypothesize or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation (Andrade, 2000). Students have input in what the possible outcomes of their assignment are, which gives them ownership in the expectations of their final product. Manipulating information and ideas through these processes allows students to solve problems and discover new meanings and understandings for themselves. In helping students become producers of knowledge, the teacher's main instructional task is to create activities or environments that allow them opportunities to engage in higher-order thinking including: critical, logical, reflective, metacognitive, and creative thinking (Chapman, 2003).
A look at creating an Instructional Rubric (IR) with your students:
The model I used to create rubrics with students was found in, Using Rubrics to Promote Thinking and Learning, by Heidi Andrade.
1. Look at Models--review examples of good and poor work and have a class discussion of what makes the one piece of work good and the other work poor. Record the student’s responses during the discussion.
2. List Criteria—Ask the students how you should assess the work. Lead the students to recall the list generated during the discussion of the good and the poor work examples. List the students’ ideas under the heading “Criteria” or “What Counts”. Guide students to think of less obvious ideas or criteria as well. Once students have given their ideas of criteria you may add what you want and explain why that criteria is important to the quality of work.
3. Pack and unpack criteria—After class take time to combine the criteria.
4. Articulate levels of quality—once again, go back to the students’ discussion of good and poor work and look at the models. Sketch out four levels of quality for each criterion. Example: 4= YES! 3= YES BUT! 2= NO BUT! 1= NO! Ask students to tell you about some of the mistakes they may have made in the past.
5. Create a draft rubric—after class, draft a rubric that includes the criterion that was generated with the class and expand on the levels of quality.
6. Revise the draft—show the draft to the students and ask them for comments and revise where necessary. Then have the students use the rubric when assessing their own and their peers first and second drafts (Andrade, 2000).
Creating rubrics with your students gives them an opportunity to have a voice in what matters to their work. “Thinking and talking about the qualities of good and poor work is powerfully instructive. Your students will not only help you create a rubric; they will also learn a lot about the topic at hand (Andrade, 2000).”
I believe this model for creating a rubric with your students could be a Constructivist approach to teaching and learning. In Constructivism- people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences (Gray, 1997). Constructivism features learner-centered instruction in a democratic environment; active learners who build and create meaning and knowledge; learners who hypothesize, question, investigate, imagine and invent; learners who reflect and make associations with prior knowledge to reach new understandings. Learners are actively involved in a process of meaning and knowledge construction. Students are asking questions, leading discussions, investigating and exploring new ideas and concepts, and they are assessing their own learning and understanding. When creating a rubric, students are working together in groups (Gray, 1997).
As educators we know students learn best when they are able to construct their own knowledge. Each student has their own schema, which is their own experiences, and it is unique to them; therefore each student learns in a way that is as unique to them just as their fingerprints are. Student-created rubrics can draw on the students’ own schema as they give and discuss their reasons for criteria based on the examples of good and poor work; thus the individual student is constructing their own working knowledge of quality for the work. If students’ then are constructing their own knowledge of quality work, the student-created rubric should support understanding. In “Using Rubrics to Promote Thinking and Learning”, research shows students who use instructional rubrics would internalize the criteria contained in the rubric and thereby develop an understanding of good writing (Andrade, 2000).
Rubrics as a self-assessment tool for learning
Instructional rubrics can blur the distinction between instruction and assessment. The use of rubrics has a powerful effect on teaching and, in turn, on the students learning (Andrade, 2000). When students engage in the process of creating their own rubric they are creating their own assessment tool for learning how to produce quality work in which they have a vested interest. Once the assessment tool or rubric has been made, the students use that tool as a guide to produce the quality of work they deemed was quality based on what they said, “what counts”. After the students create a piece of work, they use the rubric to assess their work. When the students assess their work they look at the criteria and the levels of quality. If the work is not of top quality, the student makes changes to the work to make it better. This act of using the rubric for self-assessment has an effect of self-assessment for learning and metacognition (the act of monitoring and regulating one’s own thinking).
From my research, I have concluded rubrics not only could be an effective way to engage students to be on-task during writing, but they are also a great teaching and learning tool that can be used to help students construct knowledge while using higher-order thinking and can be an engagement and assessment tool used for learning in a variety of ways for multiple outcomes. In my classroom this year I will apply this new knowledge I have gained to my practice. I will help students to discover how rubrics can support their thinking and learning as we create rubrics for learning together.
Bibliography
References
Andrade, H. (2000). Using Rubrics to Promote Thinking and Learning. Educational Leadership, 57, 13-18.
Andrade, H. L., Want, X., Du, Y., & Akawi, R. L. (2009). Rubric-referenced self-assessment and self-efficacy for writing. Journal of Educational Research, 102(4), 287-304.
Chapman, E. (2003). Assessing student engagement rates. ERIC Clearing House on Assessment and Evaluation, 40, 35-37.
Jackson, C., & Larkin, M. (2002). Rubrics: Teaching Students to use grading rubrics. Teaching exceptional children, 35, 40-45.
Montgomery, K. (2000). Classroom rubrics: systematizing what teachers do naturally. Clearing House, 73, 324-328.
Stiggins, R. J. (2001). Student-involved classroom assessment (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Merrill Prentice Hall.
Gray, Audrey (1997). Constructivist Teaching and Learning SSTA Research
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