Saturday, November 14, 2015

Using Rubrics to Apply Grading Criteria: Bean & Writing Assessment in the Early 21st Century: Yancey

As I was reading Bean's piece I was trying to remember how I graded my student's pieces before we started using rubrics. I couldn't really remember too much. I kind of remember red penned papers with comments and a random grade on top. I'm not really sure how I came up with the grade. This seems ludicrous to me. I think I then moved on to just giving a number 1-6 based on the ideas from one of the state testing rubrics, (GEPA at the time) but I never created the rubric. I also remember using checklists. How did I get away with this? How did parents not call me up and make me explain my every grade? They never did. Was this just the standard that was going on throughout schools everywhere? I am happy to say that rubrics make so much sense to me now. They have been life changing in grading my student's writing pieces. I do think that they still leave room for subjectivity, but they make our jobs, as writing teacher's so much easier. I also think that teaching younger students certain skills makes the creation of rubrics manageable for me, as those specific skills make their way into my rubrics. I like how Bean pointed out that there are so many types of rubrics out there and that teachers can make the rubric fit who they are and what they expect of their students.

Yancey's piece explains that writing assessment in higher education is sticky business. Over the years the different methods have been deemed conflicted, unfair, culturally biased, and purposefully questionable. There has been progress made to make writing assessments more open and productive for students. She discusses the use of portfolios as one way method. Student response to using portfolios has been very positive. They show growth as well as areas of difficulties. Students are able to reflect on themselves as writers. However, even portfolios can be used in different ways by different teachers making their reliability as a writing assessment unclear. The entire article for me sounded as though, there is this struggle to finding a well balanced assessment. I'm not sure if one exists. I think that there should be an emphasis on several assessments to determine the growth of a writer and analyze a program. Formative and summative assessments are both valuable. Clearly there is still a lot of work to be done in this area.

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