This article first appeared on the MiddleWeb site (with permission from the author) in 1997, in the early years of rubrics in the classroom. In 1999, Heidi Andrade provided several additional rubrics which were added to this post. More than 15 years after this material first appeared at MiddleWeb and long after its original link was functional, it continues to be one of the most sought-after MiddleWeb resources. For that reason, we’ve reposted it here and redirected the original link to this new page. At the end of this post, we’ve also included links to several rubrics associated with inference, independent writing, and literary conversation. 

Please note that the portion of this post which was published at Educational Leadership can also be accessed at the ASCD site (4/20/13). Today, Dr. Andrade is an associate professor at the University of Albany (SUNY) and continues to be a leader in the field of formative/classsroom assessment and rubrics. In a more recent Educational Leadership article (January 2008), she emphasizes that “Rubrics can be a powerful self-assessment tool—if teachers disconnect them from grades and give students time and support to revise their work.”

Understanding Rubrics

What Is a Rubric?

A rubric is a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work, or “what counts” (for example, purpose, organization, details, voice, and mechanics are often what count in a piece of writing); it also articulates gradations of quality for each criterion, from excellent to poor. The term defies a dictionary definition, but it seems to have established itself, so I continue to use it.

The example in Figure 1 (adapted from Perkins et al 1994) lists the criteria and gradations of quality for verbal, written, or graphic reports on student inventions – for instance, inventions designed to ease the Westward journey for 19th century pioneers for instance, or to solve a local environmental problem, or to represent an imaginary culture and its inhabitants, or anything else students might invent.

This rubric lists the criteria in the column on the left: The report must explain (1) the purposes of the invention, (2) the features or parts of the invention and how they help it serve its purposes, (3) the pros and cons of the design, and (4) how the design connects to other things past, present, and future. The rubric could easily include criteria related to presentation style and effectiveness, the mechanics of written pieces, and the quality of the invention itself.

The four columns to the right of the criteria describe varying degrees of quality, from excellent to poor. As concisely as possible, these columns explain what makes a good piece of work good and a bad one bad.

Why Use Rubrics?

Rubrics appeal to teachers and students for many reasons. First, they are powerful tools for both teaching and assessment. Rubrics can improve student performance, as well as monitor it, by making teachers’ expectations clear and by showing students how to meet these expectations. The result is often marked improvements in the quality of student work and in learning. Thus, the most common argument for using rubrics is they help define “quality.” One student actually didn’t like rubrics for this very reason: “If you get something wrong,” she said, “your teacher can prove you knew what you were supposed to do!” (Marcus 1995).

A second reason that rubrics are useful is that they help students become more thoughtful judges of the quality of their own and others’ work. When rubrics are used to guide self- and peer-assessment, students become increasingly able to spot and solve problems in their own and one another’s work. Repeated practice with peer-assessment, and especially self-assessment, increases students’ sense of responsibility for their own work and cuts down on the number of “Am I done yet?” questions.

Third, rubrics reduce the amount of time teachers spend evaluating student work. Teachers tend to find that by the time a piece has been self- and peer-assessed according to a rubric, they have little left to say about it. When they do have something to say, they can often simply circle an item in the rubric, rather than struggling to explain the flaw or strength they have noticed and figuring out what to suggest in terms of improvements. Rubrics provide students with more informative feedback about their strengths and areas in need of improvement.

Fourth, teachers appreciate rubrics because their “accordion” nature allows them to accommodate heterogeneous classes. The examples here have three or four gradations of quality, but there is no reason they can’t be “stretched” to reflect the work of both gifted students and those with learning disabilities.

Finally, rubrics are easy to use and to explain. Christine Hall, a fourth grade teacher, reflected on how both students and parents responded to her use of rubrics:

Students were able to articulate what they had learned, and by the end of the year could be accurate with their evaluations. Parents were very excited about the use of rubrics. During parent conferences I used sample rubrics to explain to parents their purpose, and how they were used in class. The reaction of parents was very encouraging. They knew exactly what their child needed to do to be successful.

How Do You Create Rubrics?

Rubrics are becoming increasingly popular with educators moving toward more authentic, performance- based assessments. Recent publications contain some rubrics (Brewer 1996; Marzano et al 1993). Chances are, however, that you will have to develop a few of your own rubrics to reflect your own curriculum and teaching style. To boost the learning leverage of rubrics, the rubric design process should engage students in the following steps:

1. Look at models: Show students examples of good and not-so-good work. Identify the characteristics that make the good ones good and the bad ones bad.
2. List criteria: Use the discussion of models to begin a list of what counts in quality work.
3. Articulate gradations of quality: Describe the best and worst levels of quality, then fill in the middle levels based on your knowledge of common problems and the discussion of not-so-good work.
4. Practice on models: Have students use the rubrics to evaluate the models you gave them in Step 1.
5. Use self- and peer-assessment: Give students their assignment. As they work, stop them occasionally for self- and peer-assessment.
6. Revise: Always give students time to revise their work based on the feedback they get in Step 5.
7. Use teacher assessment: Use the same rubric students used to assess their work yourself.

Step 1 may be necessary only when you are asking students to engage in a task with which they are unfamiliar. Steps 3 and 4 are useful but time-consuming; you can do these on your own, especially when you’ve been using rubrics for a while. A class experienced in rubric-based assessment can streamline the process so that it begins with listing criteria, after which the teacher writes out the gradations of quality, checks them with the students, makes revisions, then uses the rubric for self-, peer-, and teacher assessment.

Ann Tanona, a second grade teacher, went through the seven-step process with her students. The result was a rubric for assessing videotaped Reading Rainbow-style “book talks” (fig. 2).

Tips on Designing Rubrics

Ann’s rubric is powerful because it articulates the characteristics of a good “book talk” in students’ own words. It also demonstrates some of the difficulties of designing a good rubric.

Perhaps the most common challenge is avoiding unclear language, such as “creative beginning.” If a rubric is to teach as well as evaluate, terms like these must be defined for students. Admittedly, creative is a difficult word to define. Ann handled this problem by having a discussion of what the term “creative beginning” meant in the book talks. Patricia Crosby and Pamela Heinz, both seventh grade teachers, solved the same problem in a rubric for oral presentations by actually listing ways in which students could meet the criterion (fig. 3). This approach provides valuable information to students on how to begin a talk and avoids the need to define elusive terms like creative.

A second challenge in rubric design is avoiding unnecessarily negative language. The excerpt from the rubric in Figure 3 avoids words like boring by describing what was done during a so-so beginning to a talk and implicitly comparing it with the highest level of quality. Thus, students know exactly what they did wrong and how they can do better next time, not just that the opening to their talk was boring.

Articulating gradations of quality is often a challenge. It helps if you spend a lot of time thinking about criteria and how best to chunk them before going on to define the levels of quality. You might also try a clever technique I have borrowed from a fifth grade teacher in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She describes gradations of quality as: “Yes,” “Yes but,” “No but,” and “No.” For example, Figure 4 shows part of a rubric for evaluating a scrapbook that documents a story. This approach tends to work well, as long as you aren’t too rigid about it. Rigidity can have amusing results: One student wrote out the lowest level of quality for the criterion, “Is it anachronism free?” this way: “No, I did not remember to not use anachronism”!

What to Do Once You’ve Created Rubrics

Creating rubrics is the hard part – using them is relatively easy. Once you’ve created a rubric, give copies to students and ask them to assess their own progress on a task or project. Their assessments should not count toward a grade. The point is for the rubric to help students learn more and produce better final products, so including self-assessments in grades is unnecessary and can compromise students’ honesty.

Always give students time to revise their work after assessing themselves, then have them assess one another’s work. Peer-assessment takes some getting used to. Emphasize the fact that peer-assessment, like self-assessment, is intended to help everyone do better work. You may also need to hold students accountable for their assessments of a classmate’s work by having them sign off on the rubric they use. You can then see how fair and accurate their feedback is, and you can ask for evidence that supports their opinions when their assess-ments don’t match yours. Again, giving time for revision after peer-assessment is crucial.

Parents can use rubrics to help their children with their homework. Finally, when you assess student work, use the same rubric that was used for self- and peer-assessment. When you hand the marked rubric back with the students’ work, they’ll know what they did well and what they need to work on in the future.

Grading (if you must) is also relatively easy with rubrics. A piece of work that reflects the highest level of quality for each criterion obviously deserves an A, one that consistently falls in the lowest level is a D or F, and so on. Because one piece of work rarely falls in only one level of quality, many teachers average out the levels of quality, either formally or informally.

Rubrics can also be included in portfolios. However you use them, the idea is to support and to evaluate student learning. Students, as well as teachers, should respond to the use of rubrics by thinking, “Yes, this is what I need!”

References

Brewer, R. (1996). Exemplars: A Teacher’s Solution. Underhill, VT: Exemplars.
Marcus, J. (1995). “Data on the Impact of Alternative Assessment on Students.” Unpublished manuscript. The Education Cooperative, Wellesley, MA.
Marzano, R., D. Pickering, and J. McTighe (1993). Assessing Student Outcomes: Performance Assessment Using the Dimensions of Learning Model. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Perkins, D., H. Goodrich, S. Tishman, and J. Mirman Owen (1994). Thinking Connections: Learning to Think and Thinking to Learn. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

OTHER RUBRICS

from Heidi Goodrich Andrade

(1999)

In a 5-paragraph essay, be sure to:

– form an opinion on this issue and support it with strong arguments and relevant information.

– use your knowledge of democracy to explain how having or not having such a law would affect a democratic society like ours.

More Classic Resources about Rubrics
from Earlier Versions of the MiddleWeb Site

Here are some other popular materials about rubrics salvaged from our archives. These rubrics resources are not connected to the work of Heidi Andrade. Most were contributed by teachers.

Juli Kendall’s Inference Rubric & the story behind it

Independent Writing Rubric (adapted by Juli Kendall, 2002)

Student Friendly Writing Rubric (Maryvale Elementary)

A Rubric to Evaluate Literary Conversation (adapted by Juli Kendall and Outey Khuon)

The wonderful literacy teacher and coach Juli Kendall passed away in 2006 after a long battle with ovarian cancer. For several years Juli (far right in photo) was not only active in our MiddleWeb listserv community but wrote a “reading and writing workshop journal” for MiddleWeb (these were the years before blogging became easy and popular). This post about her inference rubric and the story behind it is still sought out by teachers, so we’re sharing it once again here at our new website. We plan to repost more from Juli’s timeless writings about literacy in the coming year. Her books for Stenhouse, co-authored with Outey Khuon, are still available and valuable.

Juli Kendall’s Inference Rubric

Download the Inference Rubric (PDF file)

Juli Kendall is posting this inference rubric in the hope that it will prove useful to middle grades teachers looking for a tool to assess inference skills across the curriculum. Here’s her explanation.

I made the decision very early on in the writing of my journals to focus on reading (book selection, reading aloud, running records, shared reading, guided reading, just right books, talking about books, thinking aloud about books, etc.) rather than writing and the writing response.

Therefore, I have not covered Reading Logs, Reading Journals, or Reading Notebooks, although I have always used them with my students. I felt that middle grades teachers have much more background in writing, and this Workshop project could allow us to cover less familiar territory — talking about reading to build understandings.

I did decide to devote a section of Reading Workshop to content area reading since it is so important in middle school. And since I am teaching in elementary this year, I can so clearly see that teachers are not always teaching kids “how to do it.”

As I was working on my journal about content area reading, I went back through all my middle school material and found my rubric on inference. I have used it only a little this year — just enough to see that my kids (who are really repeating fifth grade) are not using much inference in their writing responses yet. I hope some of my readers will find this rubric useful, and perhaps it will spark some curiosity and conversation.

Background about the inference rubric

The Inference Rubric came about because of the collaboration on reading in all content areas at Hill Middle School, where I taught for quite a few years. I worked as the Literacy Standards Coach for reading and developed a rubric for each of our focus areas.

My team would try out the rubrics and give me feedback about their experiences. Then I would take all the suggestions from the different content areas and try to weave it into a working rubric.

The Inference rubric was always a challenge. The idea was that students would have reading response logs in all content areas and that they would use them to write a response to their reading for math, art, science, history, PE, literature, music, etc. Then the challenge became “how can we know that they are using the strategies we are teaching?” Thus, the rubric.

It was meant to be something that could be used across content areas to evaluate a student’s response to see what level of inference was involved after inference had been taught. It could be in response to a prompt or just an open invitation to write.

This opportunity to respond to reading by writing is important in content area reading. But then, how do we evaluate it? After reading lots of journals, these were the three qualities of inferring from text that stood out.

• Thoughtful predictions, interpretations, and/or conclusions about the text with depth and understanding

• Meanings, clues, and details that are not explicitly stated (inferred)

• Connections between the text and the reader’s background knowledge (schema) or ideas and beliefs

The inference rubric made it possible for teachers to talk about student’s work in responding to reading across content areas. A science teacher would give a 3 to a written response in science, a math teacher would give a 4 for one in math and they could have a conversation about the level of inference the student was using and not have to deal so much with the “assignment” issue. It made for some interesting “Looking at Student Work” discussions.

One year, our entire school (Hill) focused on just one strategy — using Inference to understand what you read. The rubric proved to be a useful tool for us. I hope you find good uses for it, too.

“A Million Words”

A Wonderful Tool to Connect with Parents

The Million Words tool basically works this way: In the first month or so of school, the teacher asks parents to tell you about their child, in “a million words or less.”

Sounds simple – and it can be very powerful – but as you’ll see in this MiddleWeb Classic conversation, there are many permutations. Fortunately for all of us who want to try this idea, this particular MiddleWeb listserv chat was populated by a group of insightful folks, many of whom had tried the Million Words tool — and in a variety of different school settings and contexts.

We’ve captured the conversation in this MiddleWeb Million Words Resource file (PDF). Feel free to download it, check out the links, look at the sample teacher letter at the end, and visit the Education World page where our chat and other related activities are considered.

What teachers need to know about students is still generating discussion in 2012.  In “When to Brief the Teacher, and When to Bite Your Tongue,” the NYT’s Motherlode posts experiences and recommendations from both parents and teachers. Some comments may make you smile while others may trigger a furrowed brow.

This MiddleWeb Classic appeared on at our site on 7/27/98. It’s been viewed thousands of times since then, so we’re sharing it here. Outdated links have been removed. Outdated ideas, if any, remain. Smile. (2012)

Creative Ways to Teach Graphing

(from Internet e-mail – author unknown)

QUESTION: I am looking for some creative ways to teach graphs (line, bar, pie,etc.). If anyone has any ideas please let me know. Thanks.

ANSWER: Use data that has a deeper purpose

Key here is that the graphs have a purpose, not just for practice. I have participated in cross curricular projects that use graphs, thus teaching the purpose and function of the graph. Talk to the other teachers and see what data they have to analyze and then help them with their work.

One of the best programs I have seen was where the math teacher required the students to analyze the costs, losses, and other factors involved in the continuation of the Civil War for either side and then the students had to produce a report to either Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis on the advisability of continuing the war for another year, complete with three types of graphs used appropriately. Another good source of data is always the science class since they usually do more graphing than math anyway.

Gathering data and recycling too!

I used a “recycling” project to do some elaborate graphs in science last year. I had the kids collect their recyclable plastics for a week…wanted them to find the numbers and types of plastic (1-7). Each kid had to present a written data collection sheet of how many of each number he or she had collected. It then became a class analysis with all kinds of ways of sorting the data. We found how many containers we had, how many of each type, what proportion of each type, which of my four classes did the best job, which class participated the best, etc. We made lots of cool graphs and they showed some interesting things. Also got a lot of stuff to the recycling center!

I wanted to have them bring it in to weigh it, too, but the astonishing amount of trash made my teammates quiver and the school janitor give it a thumbs down. I have heard of teachers who did that, though, and it sounded like a neat idea to reinforce the “SpaceShip Earth” concept. Maybe this year, eh?

NCTM has done a good video on the topic

There is a video called “Fill ‘er Up” published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and given to those teachers participating in the PBS Mathline project. (MiddleWeb note: This video may be on the internet in a format you can access – try searching with Google. Here is the lesson plan.)

Briefly the students create line graphs showing the height of water if a bottle as a function of the number of scoops. They then have to predict the graph based on the shape of the bottle and vice versa predict the shape of the bottle based on the graph. It is a good lesson with hands-on experience and a high interest level among the 6-8 graders that have done it in our district.

(MiddleWeb note: Here’s a more recent Fill ‘er Up activity from NCTM)

Ask your kids what they’re interested in studying

Anytime I want to work with graphs, I generally ask the kids what they are interested in studying. This gives them more ownership. In addition, there is a series put out by Dale Seymour called Quantitative Literacy Series has some interesting data that my students have enjoyed. (MiddleWeb note: Exploring Data is still in print. Exploring Measurements is available through used book dealers.)

Another option is to ask the other teachers what they are studying and then ask the students to generate some “good” questions that might go along with what they are studying in another class.

Graphing heart rates

I do a two-day project with 7th graders where kids graph their heart rates.

Day 1: Record their heart rate at rest. (Use rates, etc). Then exercise for several minutes (jump rope, etc) and immediately measure the heart rate. Then take the heart rate each minute for 10 minutes. If they work in pairs – one timekeeping for the other, this will take most of a period.

Day 2: Make a spreadsheet template and have them record their data on the spreadsheet. Then use the graphing feature of most spreadsheets and graph the results. This combines spreadsheets, graphing, rates and even integrates with health or PE.

Analyzing mortality data — in your local cemetery

Hopefully this is not too morbid of an idea for you. I use it to reinforce graphing skills at the same time that we discuss issues related to population growth.

We monitor the obituaries in the paper for a while, collecting data on age and gender of the recently deceased. Then we take a walking field trip to the local cemetery and collect data on age and gender of anyone who died more than 50 years ago. (I usually divide the cemetery by letters of alphabet so that we don’t only get the same people over and over). When we get back, we graph and analyze the data comparing current data with the 50 year old data which leads to a rich discussion of differences in age expectancies and why.

You need a cemetery nearby and students who will be respectful while visiting it.

Some Contemporary Resources (2012)

Middle School Portal – Quantitative Literacy (awesome – see other math guides)

TeacherVision – Analyzing Data

Teaching Quantitative Literacy (Geosciences) – good overview

A MiddleWeb Classic

Our old website is gone, but some of the best content from the early days lives on!

 Looking for MiddleWeb’s 1st Day Resources?

For many years, we featured a “First Day Resources” section on our old website. It was VERY popular and many education sites shared links to some of our 1st Day pages. When we rebuilt our site in 2012, we weren’t able to keep those old pages (and many of the links were out of date). But we did capture some of the best content and included it here at the new MiddleWeb.

Visit these MiddleWeb Classics:

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT – Open House (1998)

THE MILLION WORDS ACTIVITY – Great Tool to Connect with Parents at Beginning of School — “This is the most valuable thing I’ve ever done with my students,” one middle school teacher wrote about the “Million Words” assignment. “I’ve built an instant bond with parents,” said another. Find out how it works from teachers who are using this terrific strategy.

(more coming soon)

Visit our new Resource Roundups:

Back to School: It’s That Time Again!

New Teacher 911

Parent Conferences

Background: In the early days of “social media,” MiddleWeb supported a middle grades discussion group that grew to almost 700 members. The group conversed entirely via email through something called a list server (for you youngsters).

It worked like this: you sent an email to the list server email address and the server/computer sent that email to everybody on the participant list. If you replied, the computer sent your reply to everybody on the list. Sometimes it made for a LOT of email, so participants could choose to get a daily digest instead — everything packed into a single, if somewhat lengthy, email packet.

It was quaint but effective, and folks who didn’t mind long reads and busy inboxes loved it. Admittedly, that wasn’t everybody. Here’s one product of our MiddleWeb Listserv.

Day One and Beyond: A Week with Rick Wormeli

In 2003, in the last weeks before school began for another year, we staged a five-day listserv chat with our friend Rick Wormeli, who has generously contributed his time to MiddleWeb for many years. We discussed his then newly published book Day One and Beyond: Practical Matters for New Middle-Level Teachers (still in print and relevant today). The rich conversation included both new and veteran teachers.

Rick has gone on to become a leading proponent of whole-child learning and a popular teaching consultant across in the USA. He says that Day One is still a favorite among his growing list of practice-oriented books. It’s full of practical tips that new teachers rightfully see as “lifelines.”

This lightly edited transcript is based on five daily Digests from our listserv book chat, covering many matters great (homework, grading, pencil sharpening) and small (are there any, really?!). As you will see, in addition to great comments and advice from Rick, many veteran teachers in our MiddleWeb community pitched in with tips from their large store of classroom experience. We’ve also added quite a few “modern” links to related resources (including the portions of Rick’s book available in Google Books!)

Click here to download our Five Day Chat with Rick Wormeli

Not long ago I poked around in the site data for the first incarnation of MiddleWeb, which lived on the Internet for more than 15 years. Of course, the data didn’t go back that far. There was nothing like Urchin or Google Analytics to tell us what people liked most, way back in the late 20th century. But there’s pretty good information for the period after 2003 or so.

When I asked the Urchin software to reveal the favorite MiddleWeb page of 2011, I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn it had to do with effective instructional strategies. And I wasn’t. I know how hard so many middle grades educators work on their teaching and leadership practices. What really surprised me was the number of views for that page (over 100,000) in a 12-month period, and the amount of time folks spent there (an average of almost 5 minutes – an eternity on the Web).

We’re using data like this to choose some material from our old site to bring over to the new MiddleWeb. We can’t bring it all — there are over 2000 pages there! — but we do plan to add some of the best articles and diary entries (we’ve had quite a few teacher and principal writers over the years). We’ll feature timeless pieces like the insightful MiddleWeb journal entries of Juli Kendall, a dear friend and amazing middle grades teacher who passed away in 2006. Juli was the co-author of two popular Stenhouse books, Making Sense and Writing Sense (perfect for Gr. 4-8) which are now available in a two-book bundle.

We also plan to capture a dozen or more of the very best MiddleWeb Conversations. For more than five years, our site supported a highly active virtual community, with a membership well over 600 at its peak. We did this via listserv email — sort of the horse-drawn carriage of social media. The substance trumped the technology, though. The conversations were often wonderful, and we captured quite a few, cleaned up the spelling and punctuation, and published them at the old site.

Looking at the data, even in 2011, I see some of those MiddleWeb Community conversations positioned very high in the pageview statistics. We’ll keep them (and some other great stuff) around through a feature we’re calling MiddleWeb Classics: Best of the Old Stuff.

We haven’t done all the work it will take to create a new home for those great chats, but it won’t be long. When we do, you can just land at our homepage and click on the MiddleWeb Classics icon. That’s Row 4, Square 1. It’s the one with the lively kid’s drawing of a school bus making its merry way through the city. It served as our logo for many years.

If you’re a long-time fan or alum of the MiddleWeb Community, and you have a favorite chat or other article you want to be sure we keep, let us know!

John Norton
Founder and co-editor

PS: Folks are already asking if we might create a new connected community of middle grades educators on the Web. We’re keeping that door open, for sure. If you subscribe to MiddleWeb SmartBrief, watch for a poll in the not-too-distant future, asking folks to indicate their interest.