She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now
seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value. Worse than that,”
she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”[5]
This is the sort of outcome that may not be noticed by an assessment specialist who is essentially a technician,
in search of practices that yield data in ever-greater quantities.
The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students
whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.
it’s shortsighted to assume that an assessment technique is valuable in direct proportion to how much
information it provides.
Studies have shown that too much attention to the quality of one’s performance
is associated with more superficial thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the face of failure, and a
tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control.
As one sixth grader put it, “The whole time
I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what I’m saying or how I’m saying it. I’m worried about what grade the teacher will give me, even if
she’s handed out a rubric. I’m more focused on being correct than on being honest in my writing.”[8]
she argues, assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing.”
High scores on a list of criteria
for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized parts.
Wilson also makes the devastating observation that a relatively recent “shift in writing pedagogy has not translated
into a shift in writing assessment.”
Teachers are given much more sophisticated and progressive guidance nowadays about how to
teach writing but are still told to pigeonhole the results, to quantify what can’t really be quantified.
Consistent and uniform standards are admirable, and maybe even workable, when we’re talking
about, say, the manufacture of DVD players. The process of trying to gauge children’s understanding of ideas is
a very different matter, however.
Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow
them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective.
The appeal of rubrics is supposed to be their high interrater reliability, finally delivered to language arts.
Just as it’s possible to raise standardized test scores as long as you’re willing to gut the curriculum and turn the
school into a test-preparation factory, so it’s possible to get a bunch of people to agree on what rating to give an assignment as long
as they’re willing to accept and apply someone else’s narrow criteria for what merits that rating.
Once we check our judgment at the
door, we can all learn to give a 4 to exactly the same things.
Great exemplars for helping students find flow in writing; in other words, the ability to stay on a topic and keep the reader with them. Good practice for expository and argumentative writing as relates to CCSS.
Texting offers some interesting challenges for middle school students as they develop and practice social and emotional interactions with one another.
Starting a classroom conversation about texting can help students share and learn together the best ways to navigate the world of texting. Teachers could
Have students discuss texting in "pair shares"
Visit with students asking for pros and cons from every student (if you have a small enough group)
Include as an essay topic the things students like or don't like about texting