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I think rubrics should always shared with students when they start the assignment. so for me it is not an "IF:

I agree Noel! Mine are posted along side my standards and learning targets in my room, and constantly referred to.

I agree completely. I think the kids should know ahead of time what the expectation is.

As long as the rubrics are well constructed and use I believe they do help lead to more equality and consistency in assessment. Teachers that give the same assessments, also need to review the rubrics together for consistency across schools and district.

Many students will just complete the assessment to meet the requirements in the rubric, but students are then meeting the expectations you wrote in the rubric. If you want them to do more change the rubric. What would happen if you did not share the rubric some might do more than expected and many would not because they have no idea what is expected.

Looking at actual examples of student work ahead of time is a good idea. When we created the rubric for the Assess This assignment, we only had one example of student work. Then when we were given more pieces to assess, we quickly learned that the rubric would not work for all of the types of pieces that needed assessed.

Sometimes after using a new assessment an rubric, I reflect and notice the mistakes I made when creating the rubric and revise it. When you have students examples it makes it easier to evaluate your own rubric.

Last I checked, the iowa Assessments were not scored by a rubric. This is something I continuously struggle with. if students, teachers, buildings, and districts are measured by standardized test scores, why do we push for standards based assessments and rubrics? This will be the first year I have never taught specific focus lessons geared to higher achievement on the iowa Assessments. My district wanted me to pilot standards based assessment so I am going all out! Can't wait to compare and contrast previous years' scores to this year. Stay tuned!

Sounds more like a checklist approach. Who hasn't been guilty in their life of following a rubric like a checklist? Almost human nature.

There's my checklist comment! Should have kept reading :-) When I think of this in math though, I must admit it's a struggle to NOT say these skills are level 1, these are level 2, and so on.

I do see the checklists especially in math as a benefit when collaborative teacher teams are discussing what exactly the foundational skills of a priority standard look like and what dots to connect if a student is far away from achieving proficiency. I don't think that kind of learning progression would translate for a student who would see it as a checklist.

I think the checklist and deep learning piece are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The checklist may require certain content (based on the unit of study or course topic) but the rest of the rubric can be skill focused and framed in a growth model.

This ties in directly with a comment I made earlier, "How does this help increase student achievement scores of high stakes standardized assessments like the Iowa Assessments.

Good for us Group 1! We pretty much came up with these same criteria for our rubric :-)

I have to admit as a math teacher this peaks my interest the most. Would love to work with teachers who establish their own grading criteria for rubrics but want help 'converting' that into a conventional grade for reporting purposes i.e. report cards.

As should be the case with anything we do as professional educators.

I agree with you Shawn. Professional educators are constantly modifying and adapting their instruction to the meet the needs of their students and the curriculum. Change means growth and learning are taking place for both the student and the teacher.

When I see the word vital in this statement, it reminds me that we should only be assessing the qualities that are truly important. We need to be so careful when we are creating and assessing student work to not over assess or under assess our students.

I think this is true. Sometimes as teachers we feel the need to give a grade to everything. And while we are constantly assessing, we need to focus on the the things that are vital for the student to know.

I agree with both of your statements. The word "vital" does remind the teacher to assess only what is truly important. It is very easy for teachers to loose focus on the important skills being taught and turn their attention to mundane details that are easier to define like writing mechanics or content presentation.

This statement stands out to me because we should use rubrics for many purposes. Many times teachers just want to use the rubric to grade. We need to think about the feedback that we give students on a rubric as a way to encourage them to continue to push themselves in their learning and set goals for themselves.

I really like the word encourage here. I do not really show the kids the rubric I am grading them on (although I should). I don't know if my students are mentally there to "want" to move to the next progression. Currently I am doing a lot of forcing to learn. I think that encourage puts the wanting to learn on the students shoulders.

I like this concept - assess and encourage, not just evaluate and move on to the next assignment. In my opinion, this is where the learning on assessment and feedback is so important for teachers and students.

Students should not have to play a guessing game with instructors. We as teachers need to be transparent with our students about what they need to know and should be able to demonstrate.

So important to remember that rubrics are not the only way to provide feedback to students.

True! I would hope by the time that the students complete a project to get graded on by a rubric, that they have received feedback from formative assessments along the way.

While this seems like a straightforward idea, in reality, making a learning purpose clear and understandable to everyone - students included - can be difficult. Especially in English, the skill were teaching is not clear cut. CCSS Reading Literature 11-12.6 asks students to "Analyze a case in which grasping a point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant." However, there's no "right" answer to this skill. Student analysis of "what is really meant" could encompass a huge range of ideas. Crafting an assessment and teaching/learning opportunities that clearly delineate "proficient" analysis from "poor" analysis can't always be put into clear and understandable language. How can you quantify the qualitative?

There is truth in the challenge. But I know I have been guilty of knowing what I was looking for but not clearly communicating it to students. Then they are left to guess...which means they are likely to guess in at least some ways incorrectly. I think the more modeling we do, the more "anchor papers" we provide, the better students achieve our expectations. Putting those expectations into words and examples is its own challenge, but a worthy one.

It is nice to hear from other high school English teachers about the difficulty of measuring such subjective skills. I always struggled. One strategy I did find helpful was assigning paragraph writing as an assessment and scoring them 1-5, with a 3 being adequate and a 5 outstanding Then we would do several together and discuss what constituted a 3 and the differences between 3-4-5. That did seem to help, and students personalized the challenge of getting at least a 3 to show competency and reaching for outstanding.

I really like this chart, it's easy to follow and easy to read.

This is where I know as an English teacher, I can get bogged down in the details. All of my writing assignments have an assessment category for "M.U.G.S." as we call them (mechanics, usage, grammar, spelling), but those aren't actively taught and retaught every unit. We just expect students to have a certain level of proficiency at this point. However, that isn't always the case. There are MANY students who have not internalized the "rules" of writing. Their mechanics (punctuation) seems haphazard, grammar atrocious, usage nonexistent, and spelling like they fell asleep on their keyboard. However, a complete lack of those skills might not prevent them from being able to distinguish "what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant." I have to be careful to not allow my internal bias against poor writing ability to distort an accurate estimate of a student's learning and demonstration of the skill.

When I read through this about minimizing bias it made me think of the old ITBS/ITED tests and a student we had that was new to this country. The student was very bright but he did not perform well on the test because of bias. One example I recall was he had no idea what a fir tree was as where he was from there was no such thing.

This is also where I struggle. Our department uses the online program Turnitin.com to give students feedback on written assessments and grade almost all work. This is partially to alleviate issues with plagiarism, but mostly because it gives students and teachers a one access point to communicate feedback. The program allows users to submit rubrics that students can see. We've started assessing rough draft using the final rubric so students can see where their work is in the rough draft stage so they know which paper criteria need work. They also can view my feedback on the paper that tells them how to fix what they need to fix. My frustration is when students aren't willing to go back and look at the feedback on the paper or rubric so they know what learning skills they still need to work on. How can we motivate them to look at the results, see the connections, and make the progress in learning?

That is a great point! How do we motivate kids to go back and look at the feedback and make changes. Many of our kids just want to know what do I need to know to pass the test or assignment and once they pass that's all that matters.

You have mentioned before that kids always want to know what they have to do in order to get an A or pass...but that's what I want to know when I take a course. I want/need to know what the expected outcomes are. I feel that kids have so many classes, tests, and assignments that if they don't ask those questions or think in that kind of a structured fashion that they will crash and burn. I get that we want them to LEARN and be passionate, but especially in required courses, the passion just isn't always there and the class literally is a box to check off.

This is another area where I personally struggle. The time and flexibility needed to be truly responsive is astronomical. I currently teach 4 of the 10 sections of English 10 at Indianola High School. As a class cohort, we try to be within a day or two of each other in content delivery. However, if my students don't get a concept, it's difficult to take a day to reteach since that throws off my alignment with the other teachers. It also means that I would have would have different periods at different places. I'm hoping the flipped and blended learning opportunities will help with the time and organization issues I currently have. If I can break groups up into smaller cohorts based on skill, then use flipped/blended methods for each group, I can (hopefully) accomplish more within the time frame. It makes organization more complicated, but allows more flexibility.

This is why common formative assessments can be so helpful. If some of your students aren't getting something, it's likely that others aren't either. If you look at the whole team's formative data, it could be that everyone needs to adjust rather than just you.

And if your class is doing more poorly than another class, you can have conversations about the different instructional practices being used. We all do our best but it's ok to not be the best. Together we can do what is best for our students.

We do need to make sure that our feedback is helpful. Telling students "fix this" or "revise this paragraph" doesn't help them learn, the feedback needs to be more specific and point to the learning target.

I totally agree with giving feedback about why they missed a question or problem. If you just count it wrong the student might now have any idea why they got the question wrong.

As teachers we do have to be careful of bias and making assumptions. When I read through this about minimizing bias it made me think of the old ITBS/ITED tests and a student we had that was new to this country. The student was very bright but he did not perform well on the test because of bias. One example I recall was he had no idea what a fir tree was as where he was from there was no such thing.

I completely understand this. Teaching writing and reading at the secondary level is so very difficult.

Shouldn't this be the goal of all assessments? If it serves other purposes great. If this does not become the focus of the assessment, then a student will start chasing points.

Ideally testing should serve the purpose of helping the teacher and student see areas where they need improvement...

I think this is a real problem with ISASP

I'm willing to let ISASP run its course though - I think it is vastly improved from the old ITBS. At least it does have open ended questions and require students to process and write instead of the good ole A, B, C, or D.