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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008A28IrvinRubrics, Realities, and Responsibilities In this session, Tom Thompson from The Citadel gave a disturbing talk about using rubrics. He opened with a description of the positive reasons for using a rubric to assess writing: it helps keep teachers focused, objective and reasonably consistent. Rubrics can also serve as a tool for reflective practice because users can question whether they are teaching what they want to grade, they help students see the criteria upon which the evaluation is based, and they save time, according to Thompson. After this tight summary of the advantages of using a rubric (why would we ever grade without one?), Thompson complicated an easy acceptance of rubrics and pointed out their flaws. According to Thompson, the chief flaw is when a rubric focuses our attention on certain aspects of writing at the exclusion of others. As Thompson put it, “When I focus on X, I tend to ignore not-X.” For example, Thompson brought up the case of his home state of South Carolina's rubric for the statewide assessment of high school students. This rubric has four features: content/development, organization, voice, and conventions. Readers following the rubric look for whether a paper has a central idea and stays focused on it, never minding if the idea makes sense or not, argued Thompson. The reader also does not need to judge whether the organizational plan is appropriate to the topic, audience, or purpose—only that the paper has an introduction, body, and conclusion. One shudders to imagine the influence, then, on the teaching of writing in high schools likely bending to serve this rubric. Thus, by narrowing the focus of what is evaluated following the rubric, many other features of writing that might be important are eliminated, at least in this example. Thompson then discussed another flaw of rubrics used in mass assessments. Since these tests are under intense pressure to provide reliable scores, Thompson argued this pressure for reliability produces rubrics that focus on the lowest-common-denominator elements that can be reliably scored. These elements might include word count, presence or absence of a thesis, topic sentences, and grammar. Yet as Thompson points out, “The rubrics miss out on all those wonderful elements of writing that matter.” For example, take the concepts of satire or humor—can these concepts be reliably measured? Rubrics that produce a sum of subscores also imply that the quality of a paper is the sum of its various parts, ignoring how the notion of writing as a complete utterance or that one aspect of a paper might impact our view of a paper beyond the number of points allocated to it in the rubric, claimed Thompson. Thompson closed the session by pointing out that middle and high school teachers are the ones most under the rubric gun, and he believed the climate of “college-readiness” will soon significantly impact those of us who teach college-level. Teachers in the public schools are “rubric”ed to death and tend to evaluate writing based upon a checklist of requirements, ignoring issues of quality in favor of a done/not done judgment. Summarizing this point, Thompson said, “Mastery of a bunch of isolated skills will not necessarily transfer into successful writing.” Thompson did not claim that teachers should abandon rubrics; however, they must be aware of their dangers, the distractions they can become, and the false messages they can send. |