Unpacking Assessments: Using Rubrics to Deconstruct Your Grading
Rubrics. Most of us either love them or hate them. In this episode, James and Amalie discuss the benefits and brilliance of using rubrics, as well as the pitfalls they encountered on their paths to becoming the rubric lovers they are today.
Further reading about grading:
Why the 100 Point Grading Scale is a Stacked Deck
Rubric Resources:
Transcript
Amalie
::Remember that project that you worked so hard on only to get it back from your teacher with a number or a letter grade that told you nothing about why you made ac this week on the pedagogy tool kit, we're gonna take a look at grading and how we can use rubrics to streamline and improve our feedback process for students. So, James, when your wifi goes down at home, what do you, what's the first thing you do?
James
::power cycle?
Amalie, …
::Does that always work well?
James
::No, but it's always my first step.
Amalie
::Yeah, that's usually my first step too is to just restart everything, turn everything off, turn everything back on again. And yeah, that usually gets you something.
James
::But, what about when it doesn't, when it doesn't, then I end up having to deal with my, my cable internet provider, which is not top of my list of things to do ever.
Amalie
::No. And sometimes it's not even them. True. And then I'm really mad because now I'm angry at them and they can't even fix it. Like I'm angry, I'm angry at the wifi I'm angry at my computer I'm angry
at all the things, but it's, this, my internet's either working or it's not working. Right.
And if it is working then great, if it's not working, I have, I have a limited number of choices of what could be going wrong, but I may spend an hour and a half, troubleshooting on my computer. Like I did several weeks ago going over at restarting things, re logging into things.
James, J…
::but I remember this and that wasn't wifi that was not wifi.
Amalie
::That was something else. Similarly. Similarly, similarly, when we're doing it's working or it's not working, but there's a whole spectrum of things behind that.
You may end up wasting so much of your attention on something that isn't doing it. If you're not getting the proper feedback, there's a million ways it can go wrong.
And I thought that sort of is a, is a nice analogy for where rubrics can be really helpful with grading. When we grade, our students work, when students get their grades back, it has this number on it or this letter on it. What does it mean?
Amalie, …
::Why is that?
James
::And we probably all have those classes with instructors that put a letter on there and that's all that's on there. There's just the letter or the number and no explanation of what that might mean.
Amalie
::Or try harder. That was my favorite one.
James
::
Try harder. And you can get as a teacher carried away writing really long explanations on the, on the other side, a part that you got those teachers that just put the C on there and hand it back to you. And you're left wondering, should you have a conference? Should you just take it and move on? I just give up. But then there's on the, on the instructor side, you know, I felt I have felt in the past before I discovered rubrics that I was spending a lot of time writing a, a narrative that no
one was going to read in part to just justify the grade that I put on it, you know, so that you wouldn't be just handing them a grade with no context. But in that case, the this, this turned grading into a really lengthy process and most of that length was unnecessary.
Amalie
::And if you're like me, it became something you didn't want to do. And so it, it, you just kept putting it off and putting it off until I couldn't put it off anymore because that's not pedagogically sound for my students.
Amalie, …
::And it's not good for my mental health.
James
::And that's probably why I'm in instructional design instead of teaching.
Amalie
::I there's something about yeah, like knowing you're going to be writing, giving all this feedback and all this good input. Are they even going to read it?
James, J…
::Yeah, I think the answer to that is probably not is often no.
Amalie
::And how clear is what we're telling them.
James
::Right. And it can be overwhelming on their end too. Right. Absolutely.
Amalie
::So, I started looking at why we even grade in the first place. I have a family member who is a professor and he has always been adamantly against grades. He hates grades and he, he's like, I do them because I have to but hates it. I get that.
I do too. If we go back to Plato's Academy where this all starts. Right.
Higher education, there were no grades and there's a, there's a lot of research that intrinsic motivation is so much more powerful in learning than the extrinsic motivation of getting grades and, and things like that. But really, it all started as a sort of a need to, to rank students as a comparison, students were compared to each other.
That that was easier when there was a limited number of seats at college, there was a limited number of seats in, in any schooling. They had to be able to weed out. It was all about winnowing out who didn't get to go to school.
James
::A gatekeeping function.
Amalie
::It was a gatekeeping function. Absolutely. And then it became sort of, it became less about how somebody compared to their peers and more about their own learning path. And it provided some
standardization too so that there was also when people became more mobile in the US and they're moving around a lot, they schools need to be able to know where to slot a student in, not just by age but where, where are they in their learning?
So eventually that system sort of changes into a way to also give feedback to students. It's, it, it ends up being a way to evaluate after the fact. It's not a way to continue pushing learning forward. It's a, it's a rearview mirror.
A post mortem.
James, J…
::It is, it is, it is a post mortem of what you have learned.
Amalie
::And I think in our modern approach to education, we're a little more attuned to, to looking at things during like in the moment, how do we push that growth as we're going?
James
::Right. We'd like to be future focused here, right? The whole idea of higher education in the modern world is to prepare for the future.
Amalie
::It's less about evaluating whether somebody is worthy, which is, I mean, which is essentially what that ends up being like. Did you learn it? Are you worth getting this grade or is it where are you in the learning process and how do we carry you forward?
James
::So, so many layers, so much onion, we could un peel here.
Amalie, …
::I feel like there have been a lot of ways that we've traditionally gone about grading too. We're all familiar with the 100 point scale and I imagine we all have opinions on the, well, not being a very strong at math.
James
::It's, it's friendly to me in that regard. I do I do at least understand percentages.
Amalie
::Just a decimal focus.
James, J…
::On the other hand, I have a harder time if we're taking it out of other, you know, if we're doing points based stuff, if the whole course is worth 600 points, I have a hard time figuring out what five point is that good, am I?
Amalie
::Ok?
Yeah. See, I don't know, we also are all familiar with the bell curve that it's that middle 50%. That is the real, the average is there in the middle at the top of that curve and, and you have your outliers at some point this 100 point scale. Instead of 50% being the average, the top of the bell curve, it became the bottom and 75 became the top of the bell curve. So everything sort of shifts, to being really heavily weighted towards failure, you've got 59 chances to screw up.
James
::I always did wonder why it started at 60. Come on.
Amalie
::41 chances to get it right.
James
::Because if you're helping someone with something and you say you're halfway there, that's, that's a good thing, right?
Amalie
::But, well, and that's even in secondary in higher ed, you have 69 times to get it wrong and then 70 to 100 times to get it right. That has, that's been plaguing education for as long as anybody figured that out. I know it was, it, there have been a lot of ways that people have looked at trying to fix that where you give everything a 50 instead of a zero.
If they gave any attempt at all, it's a 50. and that's a whole other bag of hammers like that that opens up a completely other set of problems and, and the, the ethical battle that goes on in the heads of teachers when they are told they need to put a 50 for something that a student barely touched or didn't touch. Is it, is it?
Amalie, …
::The rage is sort of impressive.
James
::I've never been in that one. but I, I do remember when I was teaching English, having, well, because I assume other people are math challenged like me or I think some of some subset of them are, I would like, bring it up on a spreadsheet and say, now look, here's the grades and here's what your grade would be if you turned everything in and got full credits.
This is the best case scenario and here's what it looks like if you just don't turn in paper number three, just plug a zero in there and then watch how it falls through the floor and gasps around the room. I'm like, so turn in something. I mean, that's what I would say. I can't grade nothing. If you give me nothing, you get a zero.
Amalie
::The number of times I have said I can't grade nothing. Yeah.
James
::Turn in something I mean, because I'm, you know, I may give you, I know I wouldn't probably give you 50 for effort, but I might give you 20 for effort and 20 might be, you know, enough. And of course I was grading on a rubric, which we'll get into a little bit later. So, I mean, that would be a legit 20 because like, you know, putting your name on it, you know, might be a point in my rubric.
Amalie
::So the places where those where, where the the percentage, the numbers and the 100 point scale and those things do make a little more sense is when you have content that you are evaluating on a more binary scale, student gets it right, student gets it wrong. And we talked a little bit about this in the alternative assessment podcast that when you're dealing with things on a spectrum, you need to be able to, to evaluate and give feedback on that same spectrum.
It's all on a continuum. A rubric can show you what those things might look like. A very basic brand new person learning something all the way to master expert world class and all the various stages in between. And then a student, you can slot a student into those spots.
James
::Do we need to define for people? What a rubric is? Does everybody know what we're talking about before we talk about rubrics?
Amalie
::Why don't we talk about our experience?
Talk about what a rubric is and our experience with those rubrics.
James
::OK. So, so I think of rubrics as a grid as a spreadsheet, basically, we're gonna have criteria probably multiple criteria going down the spreadsheet. Those will be the categories of things that we're evaluating and then going across a spreadsheet, we're gonna have the levels of achievement of those criteria. So, and that could be, it could be, you can have multiple things in each direction, right?
We'll talk in a minute about maybe why you don't want to go crazy, especially at first the out of the box one in ultra and in Google classroom, I think is a five by five grid and has five criteria going down the page and five levels going across. I personally find that a little overwhelming. But before I jump into that, like, and then what you're doing essentially is instead of each one of those levels of performance going across the page as a point range, you know, and, and then you're
essentially just dropping, dropping them into that range, you know, on each of those criteria saying well was the, so for example, if it's a paper, part of it's gonna be formatting, right? You know, maybe they, maybe they have to follow some style guide A P A or ML A or something. And you say, did they follow the style guide and maybe the top of that range, maybe that's a five point item and the top of the range gets five points and you're gonna say they did AAA good to very good job of that.
They get five points and then we say they did an OK job of that. So the middle, the middle wrong, if we do three instead of five, the middle run is gonna be, you know, some, some other, some other range, something between zero and, and four or whatever, right? And then the bottom of the range is going to be like either zero or one or something like that,
which is
just, you know, it wasn't much of an effort and we would ideally have little descriptors of what each of those things look like so that people know what they're up against.
Amalie
::Yeah. So we're breaking the assignment down into sort of two directions, breaking it down first into what is it that we're even evaluating? Those are the rows, those are the, the pieces that you were just talking about and then where do they fall on mastery or accomplish accomplishment? I like that accomplishment is a good one.
James
::It's that so immediately instead of just throwing, say AC O A 70 in your class, right? Instead of, or a 75. So instead of just that big one, big letter, that one big number. Now, we've, we've got, you know, probably three, you know, and maybe five, maybe more, little areas that are giving them some feedback. So they know maybe they did a great job on all the formatting, but their argument wasn't good.
Maybe the argument was good. But the sources were lacking, you know, we could, we could imagine each one of those little rows as a different thing that's important, per the instructor or the program or whatever for, for the quality of that sort of going back to our, our modem example.
Amalie
::Our wifi is down example. Yes, I am. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna drag it back in, going back to that. It's, it's telling the students where they need to focus their attention so that they're not spending an hour and a half starting and restarting their computer over and over again when the problem is that you
know, somebody ran into a telephone pole down the street and there's no internet in the neighborhood.
It's, that allows them to actually know where their focus is and it gives them, it shows them both what they are, not sort of where they have come and shows them where they can go right in that rubric. Right?
James
::It helps, it gives them a road map for the next time. Right. And I remember the first time I ever used rubrics and it was a long time ago when I was teaching face to face class, but they turned their stuff in electronically. Right. So I took that and turned it into a PDF and I had this Excel rubric I had made and then I would just embed that or attach it at the end, you know, basically. And it had a lot of, a lot of steps, a lot of those things going down the page.
I had gotten very granular about it on that. but the nice thing, one of my students, the feedback I got from him on it. He goes, you know, I really, like, he pointed to it on his paper. He goes, I really like this and you know why I'm like, why is that? And he goes, because I know exactly what to do next time he goes, he said, I look at this, I see, I didn't put a page number on here. It costs me a point. It's not gonna cost me a point.
Amalie
::Next time in those moments, I've had a similar one where a student got really, this was a student that got really mad at me about his grade. Why did I get ac and I was, dude, I don't, you didn't do you know? Well, actually the first thing I said was, did you look at the rubric? I gave back to you? And he said, well, no, I says, OK, so we pulled up the rubric and I showed him, I said, you did, you know, excellent here.
Showed him where he had done really well on the and you did OK here, but you didn't even attempt this part. And so you got no points for it. And he went, oh, there you go. Ok. I mean, argument over there was no more and, and because it was clear for both of us, I didn't have to stumble or explain or justify the grade because that was the grade he got.
James
::And, you know, when I started doing those, even back then when I was still, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend you doing a rubric the way that I did them back then. But they were still a step in the right direction because I found, and I left myself a little blurb at the end where I could write a little three sentence paragraph or something to give them some feedback because I wanted to kind of emphasize, you know, the thing that I would do next time if I were them that would have
the most bang for the buck, right? The pattern of error is what they taught, taught us in school. look for the thing that, you know, say it's subject verb agreement. If you have real trouble with that, then focus on that because you're gonna greatly improve your writing next time around. But anyway, I still had a little spot for a paragraph, but I noticed it got very short and on some and on some, there was nothing to say other than like, good job because it's all there in the rubric,
you know, and in that scenario where they come up to you after the fact, you, it's easy to pull it back into your head because it's right there and you can, and you can look at it.
Amalie
::so I know you and I have talked before. Not, we both used to be not rubric people.
James
::That's right. We went from being not rubric people to being rubric people.
Amalie
::what was the, what, what was your turning point? Why did you not like them? And what was your turning point to?
James
::I, you know, I don't, I can't really recall what it was. I didn't like about them. I guess, you know, something, I think there was the fear that it was going to take away my ability to add nuance and, and maybe my first rubrics probably did take that ability to wa because I didn't design them well, because you kind of got to iterate here. Like what I ended up doing like on those since this was an English class and you had to make an argument, you had a thesis, you had to like make sense.
I ended up having to leave myself, you know, a good chunk of points for. Did you make an effective argument? You know, it was getting too granular, you know, took that away, you know, because I could, I wouldn't want to give what I know is an A, what I know is A B paper an A because it ticked off a lot of boxes on technical things. Right.
James, J…
::I want to make sure there's some opportunity for nuance, in giving that feedback and that, you know, sort of the box there at the bottom for that and vice versa, you know, I never liked when I would see that I felt what I felt like was the heart of whatever the project was, was done really, really well and it was the, the less instrumental pieces that weren't.
Amalie
::
And so it brought their grade way down when I, because again, it was that I didn't know how to design a rubric. Well, and I think for me, the turning point was I got really upset that I would have students that would do a wonderful, wonderful job on something. They would turn it in, but they would turn it in late. And I've set up this for every day, late five points off or, you know, for every week, late a letter grade off. It was it, which yes, they need to learn punctuality and they need to
learn how to follow deadlines and they need to do all those things and it is important but it, it feels so muddied when I'm handing a kid back a paper or a student back a paper or a project with ac on it or ad on it. When, what they really did was excellent work. They just, the part they didn't do well on was the executive functioning piece. And I started pulling that out of all of my project as a separate, it has a whole separate rubric. Got you for a lot of my things.
James
::Got you. Yeah, I mean, each thing is, each thing you put in there is kind of a, it's a commitment, right. So you got, and it can take a while to line it out to where it's, it's aligned with your values with what you really, think of as important in the project. So leaving yourself room for discretion is important. But, you know, if you do too much of that, then you kind of lose the value of having a rubric.
So, it saved me so much time and let me focus on, the future on things to do to improve that. That, that was pretty quick convert to using them, especially when I started getting feedback from students where they seem to get it more because they would read the rubric, they would look through that and see where they lost points and where they gained points.
James, J…
::And, and they would read my brief comment, you know, more than I knew
they were when I was writing and giving them the rubric ahead of time too.
Amalie
::They, they have a, they have a target to aim for. They know.
James
::Right. And the first time around, I wasn't smart enough to do that, but like they had it and I used the same one, the whole term. So like like they had it once they got the first one back. But, yeah, the smart thing to do is give it to him from the jump right here's what's expected of you. And, you know, I think if there's a thing, I see a lot in online classes when I'm working on them, it's not enough granular detail in what's expected on an assignment.
Right. There's a lot of two sentences, like, hey, do this kind of thing without, without the level of detail that I would want as a student and that I certainly would want you to include it.
James, J…
::If I'm counseling you as an instructional designer, it is so much more important in the online classes to have because you are not saying it over again.
Amalie
::There isn't somebody in the moment asking the questions? There's not, you need to have that clarity. Like I said, one of the things that I didn't like was that I would end up with students getting grades that I didn't think really reflected the quality of the product up and down both. when I went straight by the rubric and I realized at some point that I was working with a team of teachers and we were trying to develop rubrics for a project that were, that was being done across multiple
sections. And we had, I don't remember five rows of things and on a scale of 1 to 5, you know, five being most excellent one being barely tried kind of thing. So, yeah, so maximum number of points was
25. But the way most, instructors get their heads around a five point rubric is that it's an ABC D FA, one is an F two is a DC. Right. Which is great when they get five out of five on everything.
That's a 25 out of 25. That's 100 that's an A done when they get fours across the board, that's, that's 20 out of 25. That's a B A four is A B cool. The problem gets below that. When they get a three across the board, what would theoretically be ac straight down the middle that translates to 15 out of 25 which is a 60 which isn't even ac it's ad minus. It's like you've completely lost a letter grade and a half, almost two letter grades worth of, of nuance in there even using a rubric because
you haven't given, you know what they see is, well, I got 15 out of 25. That's my, I got a 60 when, in reality they did satisfactory, what you've termed satisfactory because that's the A three that's middle of the road. So learning how to build those rubrics so that you have spans of points possible or so that, so that you a adjust what equals an A, what equals A B, what equals AC when you have to translate into those right.
James
::And just, and the kind of the quick and dirty way around is just not make the, not make the bottom wrong zero, you know, make the bottom wrong. And a nice thing in a lot of these, a lot of the online tools now that are built into the learning management systems is you define a range. So say that lowest rung whether it's three slot, three divisions or five divisions is 0 to 10, right? You know, and it defaults to 10, right? But you can, you can massage it, you know, anywhere within that range.
So you're not, you're not as stuck to it as, as you might think like when you first encountered the idea of using one. But yeah, you do have to be careful about those divisions because it's going to divide it, you know, from zero. And if you want them, you know, if you wanted to follow something like what they're familiar with, then the lowest wrong is gonna have to be not just zero, it's gonna be something.
Amalie
::And I think that is probably the biggest like newbie mistake that I see with people moving to rubrics is they just go, oh well, it's X points out of X. It's percentage is still, you're still functioning on that 100 point scale and you're still waiting it to failure and you're still not being especially clear with matching the expectations with the results.
James
::So if you're an instructor and you wanted to get into the, well, first we should talk about what's good about them then. So we already talked a little bit about the feedback's more granular, right? The grading load can be a lot less and the ability to explain your grade to a student if you have a end up having a conversation about it and explaining that grade to yourself.
Amalie
::Right. When I've gotten to the end of a project and gone. Ok. So, right.
I just graded 50 of these.
How brain dead am I right now?
James, J…
::To start with the third student in the list wants to know why she got this grade and you know, and it asks you to
question what it is that you're even grading, right?
James
::Really? There's, there's this kind of bit of introspection on, on it. It's harder on you as an instructor to make these decisions and, and fine tune this thing than it is to just throw a letter on it.
Amalie
::But it's asking you to front load your work by saying, what is it that I'm grading?
What does it look like in all of its permutations that I'm going to be evaluating and then, but then that part's done. And so then when you start scoring these things that are not binary, it's right. It's wrong. Things that are on a continuum that, that do have flexibility and nuance within even even, you know, five that are at the very top of that rubric, there's gonna be nuance and difference in
how they're being executed. And so you will, this allows you to kind of, make those decisions quickly when you're grading because now you know what you're even looking for.
James
::Ok. So if you're, so if you, if you listen to this or you've already thought I might try this rubric thing and we already talked a little bit about how it'll take some fine tuning. It probably won't be perfect. The first time you do it, you'll probably like all teach all aspects of your teaching.
You'll continue to fine tune it as you go along. But say, you take the plunge, you pick, how, how do you take the plunge with? How do you jump into doing this as an instructor? Who, who's never used a rubric before?
Amalie
::
Once you understand the basic concept, the first thing you're probably going to do is you're gonna want to define what are the outcomes that you're even measuring?
James
::I, I think, I think I would say maybe pick an assignment. It may, maybe you only want to try it on like the big final assignment or whatever in your class. And, and then, and then think like you were talking about very carefully about what does this look like? Done well? And you know what's really important and how can we bracket those things into categories? Because you don't want to have like 80 things going down the page, right. you know, 35.
Amalie
::But if, you know, if I'm giving a, a project as a final, a final piece of assessment for a class and it's an English class, maybe that final piece, the things that I am looking for are, can they research, how is, what does the research look like? Can they format to the ML A standard that we talked about?
Can they form an argument? Can they proof read? What is their, what is their, you know, grammar and syntax? That might be it, those, those might be the main four things because that's what we worked on in the class the most. That's what we built up to. Those are the four things I need to see.
James
::And that might be, that might make the case for trying it on one of those sorts of projects because you may have taught this before this class. You, you sort of know what you're looking for. Those are the things that you're, that are the core skills that you're trying to help them.
Amalie
::
So, so yeah, you're identifying, what are the skills that you want the students to be demonstrating at the end of this? Then you start identifying what the criteria is for that, what is it, what, what's acceptable and that, what's, what's acceptable, what's great.
James
::What, what work, what are the levels are the level? I always, you know, I always, you know, it's easy. Exemplary is easy.
That's the full, the full points. Just call it something friendly, like, you know, excellent or, or whatever exemplary and they get full credit, but leave yourself a range. Right.
You know, it's, it's not a, a say, it's 25 points. It's not an automatic 25. It's, it's between, I don't know, it's between some number less than 25 and 25. Right. so that you can, you have some nuance within an ability to distinguish the, the best work from the, from the good, really solid work.
Amalie
::Right. I was that awful teacher that never gave hundreds. I hated giving hundreds. I've given one single. I have been in education for 20 years. I have given 1, 100 on a paper I've given 90 eights and 90 nines. But because I think there's room for growth always. And that's why I like rubrics. I think I can show them where they can grow.
James
::And obviously, like we're talking kind of, I think we both have, have in mind sort of squishy assignments where there's a lot of, room for new and, and, and we talked about really high level tasks obviously on a, on a much more low level task.
Amalie
::But, well, no, but that's, that's, I think why
those are the assignments that rubrics are really good for. They're the ones that are harder to grade. It's harder to, to grade something that's squishy. It's hard to it's hard to get to, to get your mind around it. And that's why rubrics help us put sort of walls around what we're, what we're doing for me.
James
::They help to divide the squishy part. The, did you make your argument part? Did you play sources off one another? Well, you know, the more the trickier things from the, the parts that are more or less subjective, did you, you know, how, how's your grammar?
Amalie, …
::you know how you say 12 point font with that one inch margin, the word count, you know.
James
::Yeah, those, those kinds of parts that there's not any room to argue about.
Amalie
::Well, and those are the, that's goes back to that. Those are the binary ones. Those are the, did you get it right. Did you not get it? Right. And that's easy enough to we, we know how to handle those. Yeah.
James
::And those kind of help too, I think because, you know, you want to give some reward for effort. So those were an easy way, let's say writing, OK, I'm gonna keep it into writing, let's say writing is not your thing. You, you, you never aspired to be an amazing writer.
James, J…
::You just want to write well enough that you can be taken seriously in whatever is
your profession, you're able to, to take that assignment and you can pull out that writing part and you can teach those skills that go around it.
Amalie
::You can teach the skill of argument. You can teach the skill of source evaluation. It allows you to pick out those pieces and give credit where credit is due. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. So yeah, once you have back, back to our making a rubric, once you've identified what skills you're, you're wanting to evaluate what the criteria is for that, you're defining what your scale is.
We've talked about the numbers and making sure those are look good. Then you're filling in your descriptions. That is the hardest part. What does it look like at each of these levels? What is a very beginner? Doesn't know anything about anything? What does it look like when they do it versus what does it look like when the world class expert does it?
James
::This is probably the thing that keeps people from doing it because this actually does take some, some thought and and it's another one of those things that you find tune because after you've graded a batch of this assignment, you might notice that you're like, ah I didn't include a thing in my description that definitely needs to go in my description because now that I've graded one, I realize that is an important thing to me or that's an important thing to just the craft of it.
And I didn't include it here and you can't, you don't have to be exhaustive, you know, but you, you do want, there are things that need to go in to those descriptions. Otherwise you just, instead of giving them one big C or 70 you're giving them five, right?
You, you're just giving them five numbers
that don't mean anything. Right. You know, excellent. You know that, I mean, if that you've got to give, you gotta have something but you want to keep it well, you just two things, you want to try to get it right.
James, J…
::And then you want to be open to adjusting it as you go well and testing it out before you do it.
Amalie
::If you have the time and the, the resources, especially if it's an assignment that you have maybe given before, that's probably a good place to start with. A rubric is an assignment that you have given before you can create this rubric and then test it out on previously submitted assignments.
James
::And you know, what would be a great thing if you've got friends that are this good a friend. If you've got a friend in your field, I don't know if I do either. I might have one. He's your friend too. We might take it and give it to this friend and say, hey, here's the assignment. Here's my rubric. Will you grade this by this rubric and give me some feedback on the rubric because that's what I'm trying to fine tune.
Amalie
::Here it is. I need a rubric for my rubric grade.
James
::But no, I love your idea of actually testing it out. you test it out yourself, you know, and, and, and definitely try it on an assignment that you're already deeply familiar with because, you know, after a while you get to where you can line these out for all the assignments, you know, but it's that iterative process.
It would be great if we could just nail it and it's done, but that's not really how life works in teaching, For sure. You know, you're gonna keep adjusting things if you care about your craft.
Amalie
::every time you do it probably, well, we've talked too about, about rubrics in terms of a grid, sort of something you could, you know, make with a table and word.
There's a lot of other ways to do rubrics and I'm a big fan of those. I really, I love. Well, first of all, there's a lot of tools on the internet that I will make sure we include in the show notes, rubric generators and things that can help you make the templates and can build little starter descriptions for you.
So if you already know that one of the things you need to work, you know, that you're going to include is, is the thesis statement of the paper. There will be five descriptions of thesis statement at its various levels and you can adjust those. They are completely customizable, they're, and they're free.
James
::So they're, they're a great place to start to, I'll make a quick note to say every learning management system I've ever used blackboard, the new version ultra google classroom canvas, all of them have a group, a rubric tool built in where you can build it right in there and reuse it because like what matters, what matters in writing probably matters in all. Writing, right. At least part of it. So you can reusing rubrics is a good thing.
you know, as long as they fit the assignment, but a lot of times they do, you don't necessarily have a, I think when I first started, I thought you got to have 1 to 1. I gotta have a rubric. Every assignment has a rubric. That's not necessarily the case. It's like if I, if you
got to turn in three papers, you know, three research papers, it's the same rubric for those three things. Right.
Amalie
::Well, and keeping track of, when you're evaluating that same skill over and over again in different assignments, that's, some of those rubric generators too will, will hold on to your existing, you can have little accounts on it. I haven't used these great. and that way, you know, next time I might not be, I might be doing a presentation again this time.
The presentation isn't about it isn't an argument. It's just a research presentation. So I don't need the argument part from this one, but I still want the presentation skills part and, you know, those being able to reuse the pieces because those are because you've broken it into the skills that you're grading. Right.
James
::And like, on that paper thing, if, if you know, there's certain things that every paper has to have, whether it's an argument paper or a, or a research paper or whatever, they're still going to want them to follow the style guide or whatever, you're still going to want them to communicate and, you know, English of a certain level.
Amalie
::Exactly. And then the ones, but the ones that I was thinking about that I really, really like are visual rubrics. I love them because I think they, they can give a whole different, depending on what you're, you're teaching and what you're evaluating. They can give the students a whole different way to approach what you're asking of them. And the, the ones that I've used it in mostly at almost every class will have a participation grade.
ssmen, those classes. So your:
So I started building a rubric and it has pictures and it has descriptions that are more visual in nature.
So, it's not just, did you show up, did you write five sentences in your, in your journal? Did you, those students who, who aren't gonna speak up in class, who aren't going to speak up a lot on the, the discussion boards? How do I know that they are however mentally engaged with what's happening? So, asking them to think about the ways that they can transmit, the way that they can, can, can let me know that they are paying attention, they are listening, they are engaged in this.
They might just be engaged in a different way. Those visual rubrics I think can they can also really help when you've got students who, when you're dealing with accessibility issues as well and students who just need a different, a different explanation, different approach. giving students examples of previous assignments where you have used the rubric so that they can see what that looks like when you have time when you're prepping them for the assignment, letting them
grade a sample assignment with the rubric so that they see how to apply it and it helps them learn how to apply it to their own work. And there's a lot of ways to use the rubrics that, that aren't just a straight, you know, put a check box in the in the in the box and move along baby steps into rubrics.
James
::If you're new to it, don't, I mean, this can
be overwhelming, especially the
description part. But yeah, if it's, it's, it's worth doing, it's worth doing for you and for your students because ultimately it benefits you both. This, this to me is a, a real win win technique.
You get a shorter grading session, the students get better, more targeted feedback and more future focused feedback because they can take this and run with it on the next assignment in your class that's similar to this one, you know.
Amalie
::So we will have some of these resources that we've talked about in the show notes. including a really nice one from MIT that we, that we have, we have a great, we mit has, yeah, but MIT has some excellent resources to help you get started building rubrics and we will link to those, we'll link to some articles about grading in general and some of those rubric makers. So yeah, take a look at those and subscribe and
