Handout on Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment by Maja Wilson with forward by Alfie Kohn Big Idea Rubrics aren t always the answer Foreword by Kohn Just because rubrics are better than letter grades doesn t make them ideal With grades kids take less risks think less deeply and lose interest in learning Rubrics make assessment quick and easy Kohn says to ask why we assess Is it to rank kids against each other Create an inducement to try harder Or offer exciting and informative feedback Is standardized measurement in rubric form any better than a standardized grade Creating standardized judgment of what constitutes a 1 2 3 or 4 is essentially training individuals to think in a herd mentality and check personal judgment sensibility at the door The problem is one of denying the basic subjectivity of human judgment Scorer agreement comes more easily with less important things spelling punctuation etc Too much assessment can lead to the antithesis of learning Wilson suggests that reductive thinking does not do justice to a piece of writing instead the writing itself ought to be the guide to how it might be judged There is a danger that instruction will weaken in order to support more assessable student writing Introduction by Wilson The search for certainty may lead to a focus on simple minded non complex skill focus Practices claim to be scientific but they sometimes go against common sense and lead educators astray In medicine and science best practices occasionally lead to big problems in application Contents of the Book 1 My Troubles with Rubrics They urge readers to think about specific things when reading and scoring a paper things that may not ultimately fit the paper Example given was of a poetic essay that did not fit essay conventions but affected the reader deeply Rubrics don t always allow for associative leaps of understanding moments of mystery and discovery language representing personal history slang etc and risk taking 2 There is a Cow in Our Classroom How Rubrics Became Writing Assessment s Sacred cow Introduction to the chapter reviews a brief history of assessment focusing on assessment before standardization Wilson praises aspects of literacy instruction that provide authentic feedback to writers The problem of using assessment to rank students determine eligibility for college funding entrance and otherwise compare one student to another does not ultimately work as the best way to increase student writing capacity Specific interested praise and questioning from an audience might be better suited to the task of growing writer capacity Standardized grading undermined an earlier system of free interplay between matters of public concern literacy and debate though it did support increasing numbers of students in the growing educational system Reliability between individual readers in essay grading is often low Different readers have differing backgrounds and areas of expertise what they value impacts the way they grade In the effort to create standard values in writing assessment categories were ideas form flavor mechanics and wording Categories left out included originality of expression humor and presents opposing idea Reader feedback that did not fit the more common categories were not taken into consideration as standards were created The search for clean scientific assessment of writing ignored the necessary complexity messiness and recursive nature of the task of writing well Wilson offers a valuable chart of pressures on teachers of writing to grade in a standardized way on page 25 Wilson calls for a rethinking of evaluation as the top of Bloom s taxonomy because it is a parallel case to teachers grading students where the goal of ranking students is not the same as the goal of teaching students i e evaluation is not as important as synthesis or analysis 3 The Broken Promises of Rubrics Writing may not be a simple system Writing may be more akin to complex systems like weather patterns Rubrics like grades may encourage conformity in writing brave writers that take risks and ignore rubrics sometimes produce remarkable work Wilson places student interest in meaningful feedback in contention with teachers who see their task as one of error finding When we sequence student writing instruction and say they need to learn certain forms before they use others we deny opportunities to teach students at the point where they are most ready for productive instruction It might be most valuable to look at a piece of writing to see what aspects to evaluate rather than making standard rubrics large enough to handle the variety of possible elements to consider 4 The Golden Rule of Assessment Why We Don t Practice for Assessment What We Preach for Pedagogy pg 50 offers another decent diagram on views of literacy and why we teach them Reliability and validity cause problems for implementation of portfolios as a basis for assessment on a wide scale scoring portfolios is expensive and causes problems in equanimity in assessment 5 Agreeing to Disagree the Heart of a New Writing Assessment Paradigm on page 64 65 Wilson suggests a set of principles in assessing student writing Writing Assessment Principles Grounded in Contextual and Constructivist Paradigms Should honor rhetorical purpose and effect Should be responsive and encourage new insights should include a metacognitive reading Should allow for and open the door to disagreement explore a reader s position and context for their position Should encourage readers to articulate their positions Should teach students how to extract clarity from disagreements between differing readers critics In essence rubrics should allow room for disagreement for the sake of the insight the disagreement may bring 6 Making Our Subjectivity Transparent and Useful What Response Unmediated by Rubrics Looks Like in Our Classrooms The desire of students to be understood met by teacher desire to articulate their thoughts and responses to the writing clearly is a human engagement The danger of rubrics lends to the inhuman grading performed by computers and the ultimate loss of meaningful communication This meaningful dialog gets traded for immediate though computerized feedback The conversation and process of revision in writing is valuable Students need a sense that their writing will reach genuine readers and serve a genuine purpose not just hired grading personnel or computers The author describes conversations held with writer during the
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