Tag Archives: rubrics

Scaffolding writing assignments enhances student learning and reduces teacher grading

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Danielle Bradley with teaching award banner
Dr. Danielle Bradley (fourth from left) was recognized as one of the Teacher of the Year Finalists for Broward County Public Schools. Photo from the school district’s Twitter post.

by Dr. Danielle Bradley

Almost every teacher has heard the overwhelming and unanimous groans when announcing it’s time for students to write.

Writing assignments are not usually a crowd favorite, and often teachers struggle to make this instruction meaningful and even fun.

So how does the teacher avoid grading hundreds of unimpressive writing samples while also garnering buy-in from students? The answer is scaffolding writing lessons.

What is scaffolding?

Scaffolding in education is a technique that allows teachers to use various levels of support while helping students reach higher levels of comprehension and independence. In basic terms, scaffolding involves breaking up concepts or skills into smaller parts and then providing the assistance for students to learn each component.

Scaffolding lessons can be incorporated into any classroom K-12 or at the college level. This strategy works great with any curriculum and level of learner as well. Whether a new or veteran teacher, slowing down the pace of teaching challenging content is a win for the teacher and students.

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Creating Rubrics: The art of evaluation

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by Andrea E. Hall
Ph.D. student, University of Florida

One of the biggest issues surrounding teaching today is how to effectively evaluate students. While testing is a major component, especially for our brothers and sisters in secondary education, it isn’t the be-all and end-all of the educational system as it is often made out to be.

Wilbert McKeachie’s book McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers stresses the importance of validity in assessment. Just like in research, validity asks if the assessment is measuring what it is supposed to be measuring. The reality in teaching is some topics simply can’t be evaluated as effectively with tests, which is where papers and projects often become the choice method.

However, there are often more variables to consider when assigning a paper or project than filling in multiple-choice bubbles. This where creating a rubric as a guide for both the student and later for you, as the grading teacher, is useful.

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Tips for developing and using rubrics

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by Kristina Birnbrauer
PhD student, University of Florida

Rubrics are used to support and assess student learning. They serve as performance scorecards to identify and measure criteria for student assignments. Rubrics are especially useful when grading written assignments.

They can reduce teacher-student disagreement, provide structure to the evaluation process, reduce the overall time spent grading, and provide students with a holistic picture of strengths and weaknesses.

Best practices recommend that rubrics have three to five levels of achievement or gradation. Within each level, performance measures should be clearly communicated, along with the scores/percentages for fulfilling/not-fulfilling the assignment.

The following resources can be helpful to members of the University of Florida community:

University of Florida’s Handbook for Teaching Assistants

University of Florida Faculty Grading Policy

University of Florida Student Grading Policy

Other helpful resources include:

“Understanding Rubrics” by Heidi Goodrich Andrade

Walvoord, B.E. & Anderson, V.J. (1998). Effective grading: A tool for learning and assessment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

Kristina  Birnbraurer is a student in Mass Communication Teaching (MMC 6930). Her teaching presentation was on developing and using rubrics. She is a health communication researcher. Her research involves how individuals respond to health threats.

6 advantages of rubrics for students and teachers and how to create rubrics

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by Chris Wilson
Ph.D. Student, University of Florida

In this post, I’m sharing a summary of our discussion from my teaching presentation on evaluating student assignments using rubrics.

A rubric is an assessment tool that breaks an assignment into its component parts and defines specific criteria to evaluate a student’s level of performance.

A rubric consists of three basic elements:

  1. The traits or dimensions that identify the skills and knowledge required to complete the assignment.
  2. A scale that indicates the different levels of performance for the assignment.
  3. Descriptions of each trait at each level of performance. However, in some rubrics only a description of the highest level of achievement is included.

Rubrics offer a number of advantages to teachers and students:

  1. Rubrics allow busy professors to provide timely feedback to students.
  2. Rubrics prepare students to use teacher feedback to improve on future assignments by allowing them to compare their level of performance with the ideal.
  3. Rubrics encourage students to think critically about the quality of their own work.
  4. Rubrics facilitate communication with other graders and teachers, as well as student service personnel who may be helping students to complete their assignments.
  5. Rubrics allow teachers to evaluate their own teaching by revealing areas of strength and weakness in student assignments.
  6. Rubrics can level the playing field for students of all races, languages, etc., by fostering a dialogue about expectations between teachers and their students.

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