Building the rubric
When constructing your grading methodology, the first step needs to be how you want to present your expectations. For this, you will need to understand how you as a teacher want to communicate your expectations to your students. For the sake of understanding my terms of “rubric,” I want to make it clear that a rubric, in my terms, is a constructed document that students can take as clear expectations of what their outcome should look like. Not all rubrics must rely on the traditional grid based format used to evaluate a number of points earned by a specific aspect of the writer’s work.
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What do you value most?I would advise that before you begin that you understand what it is that you as a teacher will expect from a given assignment. For an experienced teacher, they can go back to prior student work and create a dynamic criteria map of the themes you noticed most in your feedback to students. Do you value grammar? Are proper citations important for you? Ask yourself these questions as you navigate you’re past feedback. For the first-year writing instructor visiting my page, who doesn’t have access to a plethora of experience, look back at the advise you have given to your peers in the past. What advice did you offer and was that important for you? These themes can be adapted into your rubric.
Developing a standardIt is easy enough to create a grid-based rubric (like the common core one I’ve placed above) and hand it to students as their key for unlocking an A on their assignment. As an instructor you will be faced with the responsibility of what your standard will be. Your rubric will need to be concise and specific enough as to place a student into a specific bracket on the rubric. This may seem easy, but so often rubrics can rely on vague terminology that leaves room for instructors to become accidently subjective. If you have a section dedicated to grammar and errors, you need to avoid words like “some” or “few” errors. Decide how many errors, or types of errors, will constitute the points given for that section. Define errors for your students and offer them clear expectations. Are errors typos, or do they blatant misuse? Are you going to count the errors, or look to see if the errors as a whole are affecting the content? This will really help students know your expectations when you list grammar as an area for evaluation, rather than having an ambiguous term that leaves students questioning what “grammar” means. For more on error check out Suzan Flanagan's writingerrors.weebly.com.
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