Rubrics

Chapter 2 – Common Misconceptions About Rubrics (Brookhart, 2013)

Rubrics can be confusing for our students if they are not created in relation to the learning objectives. It is also stated that rubrics are not assignment directions, which I think is a valuable aspect to take into account. I believe that students still need to be able to be creative and figure things out on their own. I believe teachers need to place more of an emphasis on the process rather than the product of an assignment, although there is a place for both. It was also interesting to see that no matter the teachers experience, there were still flaws that could be found in their scoring tools. By missing key pieces in the assessment, it is likely that students are also missing a key piece in the assignment portion as well. Teachers often miss the mark on rubrics by assessing the task and not the outcome, which I find interesting because many of us think about how to assess the task. However, I do see the issue, as there are outcomes and indicators that we, as educators, need to hit. If we don’t hit these outcomes, the students are not understanding everything that they should. The overall goal is to give students opportunities to demonstrate that they have reached the learning outcome that was set out. It is also important to realize that a rubric is not a checklist for yourself or students to use.

One quote that I found really important in this reading is as follows: “one particularly uninterested student raised his hand and asked if I was going to give the class a rubric for this assignment.” She realized that her students, presumably having 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” (Kohn, 2006). This particular quote made me realize that many of our students may just be trying to get the best grade possible, rather than trying to actually learn the content. By always giving our students an exact checklist and rubric to follow, they are losing all responsibility for themselves. This is something that I am still guilty of, even in university. I base my projects off of the rubric I am given so that I will hopefully receive a good grade. However, I am now seeing how much that can hinder my learning. I often can’t remember things that I have learned in the past, likely because I just did it for the mark, rather than for my own learning. This is something that I don’t want my future students to be doing.

Andrade (2005) shares this idea of rubrics helping teachers stay organized, which is something I hadn’t really thought of. Rubrics allow us to set out expectations and where we need to focus our instruction. These same rubrics help students to understand what the point of an assignment is, but this is something I still think we need to be cautious of; we don’t want to give students a rubric that resembles a checklist.