Not long ago I finished a marathon of grading portfolios, and grading revised portfolios for my students. It’s a stressful and busy time, but the one thing I’m very happy about may be the way that my usage of holistic rubrics allows us check my source to focus this grading work on student development in reading, writing and thinking.
Many years ago I used analytical rubrics.
These are the rubrics that function similar to a checklist, where students will get 10 points with regards to their thesis statement, and get 7 points then with regards to their usage of evidence. A rubric that is holistic, generally describes what an item (such as for example an essay, analysis paragraph etc.)
looks like at each and every level, like this example from my “Analysis Writing” rubric:
- Student identifies details which are relevant to the text overall 1 and therefore clearly connect with each other, even though the connection may be less interesting or clear than at the Honor Roll level.
- Student accurately describes the literary device(s) (aka “writer’s moves”) discussed
- Student clearly and accurately describes an essential idea through the text overall 1 , though the >may not be a interpretation that is nuanced. However, the interpretation continues to be abstract, not clichйd.
- Student cites ev >attempts to use us when you look at the most way that is useful
- Student completely explains the connections between details (ev >attempting to make use of words that are signal describe relationships between ideas
As the bullet points make this rubric look much more “analytical,” the stark reality is that i take advantage of it in holistic way. We have just unearthed that students fine it better to grasp a rubric this is certainly broken up into pieces, in the place of two long and complex sentences that describe simply the same idea.
After using these rubrics for 2 years (with a few minor revisions in language) We have seen them help students grow far more than my analytical rubrics ever did, and even though I don’t spend much time “teaching” the rubrics to my students. Here is why I’m now such an admirer among these rubrics that are holistic how they are now facilitating the improvement of student writing rather than simply recording it.
1) Feedback, not grades, is the goal. Holistic rubrics support this. Through nearly all of a term I give students during my class a great deal of feedback on their writing and minimal feedback via grades. They could get a 100 out of 100 for simply completing an essay, regardless if it still needs tons of development. Because my rubric is holistic and tied to terms like “Meet Expectations” in the place of giving points for various areas of the writing, it really is easier for students to understand how their first draft needs substantial revision in order to “meet expectations” and even though their completion grade (which uses points instead) is 100/100.
2) Good writing and mediocre writing can get the same score on an rubric that is analytical. I’ve run into this dilemma some time time again.When I used analytical rubrics to grade essays I often found that simple, formulaic writing with a 1-sentence thesis statement and some basic evidence with some little bit of explanation often received exactly the same point value as writing where in fact the student made an even more nuanced point, or used more interesting evidence that connected towards the thesis in interesting ways, or maybe more important developed from the beginning to the end. Often it was as the categories I measured were really just areas of the essay: one category for thesis statement, one category for evidence, one category for reasoning, etc. With all these parts separated there was no way that is good of how well the writing flowed or was created. Moreover it meant there was no simple method on my analytical rubric there clearly was no great way to recapture how students were taking risks, and important part of writing development.
3) Holistic rubrics are just better at assessing the method in which the components of an essay work together. Once the essay that is wholeor any written piece) is described together it became easier for me to parse out the thing that was strong and weak about student writing. Take a recent example: I happened to be giving students feedback about a fairly standard essay in regards to the memoir Night. They needed to move up ion the rubric, I quickly realized that their reasoning and explanation of their evidence needed more work as I was reading student essays and considering what feedback. More specifically, students were basically paraphrasing their evidence in the place of actually explaining how it supported their thesis. I would have thought this was an isolated problem in the “reasoning” section when I used to use analytical rubrics. However, I realized that part of the reason the student reasoning was lacking was because their thesis statements were overly simplistic because I was using a holistic rubric and looking at the essay more as a whole. It is hard to develop interesting reasoning because, really, what was their interesting to say? Thanks to this holistic view I was able to give students feedback that helped them develop a stronger thesis and then revise their reasoning accordingly when you have an overly simplistic, obvious thesis statement.
4) Last but not least, holistic rubrics make grading simpler and faster. You will find far fewer decisions to create about a student grade when they get one overall score instead of five or seven different scores for each section of a piece that is writing. Fewer decisions means faster grading. With more time for personal pursuits, the reality is it just leaves more time for giving more meaningful feedback, focus on trends I see in student writing by class, etc while I would love to tell you this faster grading leaves me. I am able to make work more meaningful, and it certainly helps to make grading fun and enriching while I might not be able to escape work.