How Do Rubrics Help

Rubrics
Using rubrics can help one better assess a student’s learning because it gives a clear set of measures or criteria that can be used to evaluate the performance of the learner to see whether the student’s achievement is in alignment with the objectives of the class. The rubric acts as a scoring tool that tells the teacher what to look for in the student’s work. It can also be used by the student as a guide to tell the student what the teacher will be looking for in the work and how it will be graded. For example, a simple rubric for an essay might give each letter grade off to the side and then beside that letter grade a description of the type of paper that will earn such a grade. So an F paper might have for its description “incomplete sentences, no topic, only half a page” and an A paper might have for its description “well researched, material quoted and cited in-text, topic clear and defined with thesis, page length meets requirement.” The teacher using this tool will not have to rely on the subjective so much in assessing the student’s learning as the rubric provides the objective measure with which the student’s work can be assessed clearly and methodically.
Using rubrics can help me to be a more successful teacher by giving the clear-sighted approach needed for evaluating students’ work—and it can also give a clear-sighted view of what should be taught in the class so that the students have all the information and skills they need to accomplish the goals defined in the rubric. For example, using the rubric example above, the teacher will need to make sure that the students know how to write in complete sentences, know how to define their topic and create a thesis statement, and know how to cite their material in the appropriate manner in their essay. That rubric alone gives three very important points that a teacher will need to cover in class in order for the students to have the necessary support and training needed to get an A on their essay. The rubric, in other words, lets the teacher focus the lesson plan in a more streamlined fashion so that the points that have to be covered for the student to be prepared for the assessment are covered and gone over in a meaningful way. The teacher can spend one day or one week on how to write a complete sentence and how to watch for grammatical errors in one’s writing. Then the teacher can focus on how to write a thesis statement and allow the students to practice. Then the teacher can focus on how to cite material in the paper itself. The rubric thus serves as a teaching guide for the teacher and is not just a way to help with grading assignments: it because a guide for what needs to be taught.
Using rubrics can help me with grading in that it takes out the subjective aspect of assessing a student’s work. The subjective assessment can be based on teacher bias (i.e., the teacher may think that a certain student is troublesome in class and does not pay attention and those negative feelings could come out in the subjective assessment of the student’s work). So any tool that can be used that can neutralize or reduce the risk of bias entering into the assessment is good. Rubrics can also help with grading in that they provide both a scale for grading and dimensions or criteria that need to be looked for in the student’s work. The teacher can create the rubric by asking, “What do I want to assess with this assignment?” and then the teacher can focus on giving students details about how the work will be assessed so that students know what to try to achieve in their work. The rubric allows for a clear distribution of points and a clear way for one level of grade to be moved to another. The rubric gives clear dimensions and parameters for each grade level.