*Written for a teaching methods course at Penn State, Spring 2010.
How can teachers provide meaningful feedback on student writing?
English teachers are faced with a mountain of student work to grade and the difficult task of providing valuable feedback from an objective position. This is time-consuming work, but is critical to student development. As I have considered ways of teaching writing to students, I have become concerned about the use of rubrics as a technique for quick, unbiased grading. I can understand that there are many reasons teachers might want to use rubrics. As a tool, rubrics break down student writing into easily evaluated categories that can help students focus their writing and revision on the characteristics the teacher has already identified as important. While grading, teachers can use rubrics to shorten the time they spend with each submission from their students. Because they are evaluating students on characteristics they have already identified, they can read through quickly in search of those elements. If a student or a student’s parent questions a grade, the teacher has a document of the grading process to explain the score received. The rubric seems to be a tool to help teachers approach grading writing with objectivity.
I question whether the rubric provides a truly objective perspective in grading and whether the feedback a student receives from numbers circled on a chart or table is beneficial or productive. As a student, I know that I tend to ignore comments that teachers leave in the margins of papers and I rarely pay close attention to comments left at the end to justify a grade, but I also do not pay attention to the numbers a teacher circles on a rubric, especially if there are no comments accompanying the teacher’s selections. Although the rubric is often used to provide objectivity, I think the process of grading student writing remains incredibly subjective. A rubric provides a student with information about how the teacher will grade their writing before the student even begins to write, but that element of transparency does not prevent teachers from bringing their own writing preferences and experiences from the grading process.
Writing is a critical task for high school students to learn, but they cannot do so if they are not given the support they need to improve their skills. Frequent practice and a variety of writing assignments can help students work on their writing skills, but they also need to receive constructive feedback and to learn how to revise their work and incorporate that feedback into an improved final draft. The process of learning to write is ongoing, and we cannot expect young writers to know how to evaluate and incorporate feedback into their writing. As high school English teachers, we must provide our students with that feedback, while teaching them how to use it well. In college, I had the opportunity to work as a writer and editor for the campus newspaper; in my jobs post college I worked as a full-time writer and editor. In these experiences, I was reading and responding to work from other writers and having my own writing edited daily. I do not think that I knew how to incorporate feedback before I had these experiences, and I would not expect my high school students to be able to do so.
I am interested in learning how to respond to student writing in a way that is most effective for them. I do not want to use a rubric for the sake of making my life as a teacher easier if it is not going to provide feedback that my students can use to improve their writing skills. I also do not want to leave students without the knowledge of what they do well and how they can make their work better. I can understand the myriad reasons that teachers might have for using rubrics, but I am concerned that their use is not the most effective way to assess student writing. In order to teach students to revise their work and incorporate feedback, teachers need to provide constructive feedback that is useful and relevant to students. In order to do this, we need to recognize any biases we might bring to the grading process and not hide them through the use of a rubric. I believe that there have to be better ways to assess students’ writing assignments than rubrics, and I intend to explore those options through this inquiry project.
What the Research States
English teachers everywhere express some amount of concern or frustration over the time-consuming task of grading hundreds of student papers. A discussion on the English Companion Ning, “Best Practices for Grading Student Work,” has received two pages of responses from teachers who have hours of grading to complete and have devised their own systems for handling the workload. All are concerned with the question I have chosen to research: how to provide meaningful feedback on student writing in a time-efficient manner.
There are any number of benefits that teachers gain from using a rubric to grade student work. In my research, I have found that the best rubrics are so carefully and thoughtfully designed that they may not save a significant amount of time or work for the teacher. In describing how teachers can use rubrics for grading, Peter Smagorinsky lays out the sample criteria he might use for a portfolio assignment. “The portfolio assignment includes some very clear, unambiguous requirements (e.g. a minimum number of exhibits, an explanation of each, and synthesis paper). Some students believe that simply producing the minimum requirements should earn them a high grade” (102). In this case, the use of a rubric provides students with a detailed list of criteria for receiving a high grade on the project and is a useful tool in knowing what is expected of them before the project is turned in. Teachers can also gain from using a rubric:
You will find rubrics especially useful as you experience fatigue from grading: that is, when you’ve been grading for a while and your attention begins to slip and you need a reference point for making distinctions among performances. You will also find rubrics useful if your grading decisions are challenged by a student, parent or administrator. If your rubric makes clear distinctions and you can demonstrate how your grading is informed by these distinctions, you will have fewer headaches to contend with. (Smagorinsky 105).
In my research, I have also found educators who question the value of the rubric and feel that it does not provide students with feedback they can actually use. Maja Wilson writes frequently about her criticisms of the rubric. “Rubrics were developed to make direct writing assessments palatable to testing companies—and thank goodness, or multiple-choice grammar tests would still be the only acceptable method of determining writing skill. However, the disagreement that is inevitable when unique individuals bring their perspectives to a text doesn’t lend itself to objective testing procedures. So rubrics meet the demands of objectivity by distancing teachers from their own perceptions in order to create agreement among readers—writing assessment’s view from nowhere” (Wilson). Her belief is that rubrics remove the thoughts and perceptions of the reader and the writer from the assessment process; because writing is a process that is inherently concerned with the writer’s audience, we do our student writers a disservice when we remove that audience. Writing assessment needs a “view from somewhere,” according to Wilson.
Because the rubric was designed to include writing on standardized tests, many researchers argue that the use of the rubric encourages the standardization of the writing process. There are some who criticize the use of rubrics for leading teachers to focus an inordinate amount of evaluation on matters such as spelling and organization, which scorers can easily agree on (Mabry 676). “Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they are doing is exact and objective” (Kohn 12). Smagorinsky counters this point: “They assume that efforts to make evaluations fair and consistent inevitably lead to box checking rather than careful reading. In my view, it all depends on what’s in the boxes and how a teacher interprets the task of evaluation” (105). Louise Rosenblatt (1976) similarly argues that the meaning of a text does not derive directly from word choice but instead comes from the reader’s experiences and the meaning that each person brings to the work. If we believe that each individual brings a unique perspective to reading, the same must be true for writing, because the two skills are inextricably linked.
If not rubrics, then what?
The difficulty I have encountered in my research is that teachers see rubrics as a tool for grading. “You can’t teach without giving a grade in most schools. And you need to grade in ways that students (and often their parents) find consistent, equitable, and defensible. A rubric is a way to specify the code you’re using to evaluate student work” (Smagorinsky 107). Seen this way, the rubric is a valuable tool for teachers and students. A student knows what is expected of him before he even begins the assignment at hand. A teacher, having already laid out the expectations, has a clear and detailed list of criteria with which to evaluate, which provides a helpful defense if there are questions from a student on why he received a particular grade.
What this argument leaves out, however, is the difference between grading and feedback. Though grades are a necessary part of teaching, they do not inherently provide any valuable feedback to students and they do not help students understand how to improve their writing. In the same chapter where he advocates for the use of the rubric, Smagorinsky discusses other ways that teachers can respond to student writing throughout the writing process. “By providing in-process feedback to writers and other composers, teachers become more oriented to the growth of the learners than to the perceived quality of their final products” (Smagorinsky 96). There are several methods suggested for teachers to respond to student writing, including peer feedback on drafts and writing conferences with the teacher.
Maja Wilson’s system of writing conferences and assessment as conversation is one way that teachers can provide this feedback. “How can teachers view writing assessment as conversation? First consider what goes on in your mind as you read students’ writing, and articulate those reactions; give each student your experience of reading her or his paper. As students respond to your reactions, you might find that your interpretation and suggestions change. Be open to each writer’s purposes, experiences, and personality, using everything you know about that person and yourself as a reader.” (Wilson). The anti-rubric researchers are often criticized for not providing a viable alternative to the use of the rubric; my research shows that this is a valid criticism. Wilson’s suggestion of writing assessment as conversation pertains to the process of revising the paper and encourages the teacher to explore the writer’s perspective when providing feedback to help the writer fine-tune a piece; in her classroom, she and the student decide together what grade to assign. In other research, there is often no suggestion of a better way to submit grades.
My conclusion is that rubrics are an adequate system of grading only. They should not be thought of as a way to provide feedback and can only be used to help students make sense of the assignment and to provide a final evaluative grade after the student has already received meaningful feedback from the teacher (and perhaps had the chance to incorporate that feedback before submitting an assignment in its most final version. In the meantime, teachers need to do a better job of guiding their students through the writing process and holding conversations with individual students to ensure each person receives feedback on a draft and has the chance to incorporate that feedback.
A Conclusion and a Case Study
Assessment conversations are, admittedly, a time-consuming practice. Even a 10-minute discussion with each student would consume hours of a teacher’s time. To address this, I would suggest the following design (based on Maja Wilson’s classroom as explained in her article in Educational Leadership):
In the beginning of the school year, I would work with the students to teach them how self-edit and peer-review drafts. Students cannot be expected to know how to provide mature feedback but if expectations are set forth early on and a process of workshopping writing is modeled, I believe that they can learn how to do so independently. Later in the year, students will workshop their drafts while the teacher holds writing conferences with a few students per period. The goal would be to have each student participate in at least two writing conferences per year; the teacher would not conference with every student on every assignment, but those students would still receive feedback from their peers during the workshops. When the student has had a chance to incorporate that feedback, he will submit a final draft to the teacher, which can be graded using a rubric if the teacher chooses, but included with the rubric should be specific comments to help a student understand why they are receiving a particular grade. None of these comments needs to be long, but should give a student an idea of what was good about the assignment and a suggestion for improving.
Like Wilson, I would also like to approach assessment as conversation and provide the students with an opportunity to assess their own writing. In part, her approach is intended to take some of the focus away from grades, because “using grades to prompt revision usually leads students to ask, What changes should I make for free more points?” (Wilson). Encouraging students to focus on make their point more clearly and more interesting to their audience involves a deeper conversation than how to earn more points or increase a grade. “The conversations that teachers have with students about their writing – questioning, articulating, and changing perspectives together – are not dialogues we have before assessment takes place to give the student a fair shot at the best possible grade; they are assessment” (Wilson). Though I agree with Wilson that the conversation itself can serve as an assessment, I am concerned that there would not be enough time in the school year to have a dialogue with every student about every assignment. Wilson handles this by discussing only a few assignments per year with her students, but I would like to alternate between assessment conversations and peer feedback as discussed above to ensure that students get adequate feedback and opportunity for revision without placing unrealistic demands on the teacher’s time.
Works Cited
Best Practices for Grading Student Writing Samples. 12 March 2010. 24 March 2010 <http://englishcompanion.ning.com/forum/topics/best-practices-for-grading?groupUrl=teachingwriting&id=2567740%3ATopic%3A202444&groupId=2567740%3AGroup%3A3453&page=1#comments>.
Kohn, Alfie. “The Trouble with Rubrics.” English Journal (2006): 12-15.
Mabry, Linda. “Writing to the Rubric: Lingering Effects of Traditional Standardized Testing on Direct Writing Assessment.” Phi Delta Kappan (1999): 673-679.
Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. New York: Noble and Noble, 1976.
Smagorinsky, Peter. Teaching English by Design. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2008.
Wilson, Maja. “The View from Somewhere.” Educational Leadership (2007-2008): 76-80.
