Reflecting on Rubrics

For this week’s activity, I continued to add to and refine my curriculum page for the six traits of writing project my third grade students will be completing.  This week I created a rubric for assessing students’ learning.  I wanted to focus on whether or not they actually learned what their assigned trait is and if they could explain how their examples of the author’s writing display the trait.  If they can teach the class WHY the author’s writing is a perfect example of the trait, then I will know that they have a good understand of the trait.  I also am requiring pictures or graphics in a presentation format so I can see if my students understand how to use technology to create a presentation that includes pictures or graphics.

I created my rubric using a site I learned about in my class module called iRubric.  You can view my rubric from my curriculum page or at http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?code=G49A7B&sp=yes.

I learned some valuable information when creating this rubric.  I had heard of creating rubrics online before.  Many of my colleagues have told me about rubistar.  They said it was great for creating rubrics and finding already made rubrics.  However, I never used a program to create a rubric before because I like my rubrics to be very specific.  I think an advantage of using a rubric is that it provides authentic assessment, rather than just giving a test or grading completely subjectively and just guessing a grade.  Because of this, I did not think that any premade rubrics would benefit me.  Since I was creating my rubric from scratch, I didn’t see any reason why creating it in a rubric program would be any better than creating it in Word, so I always just used a table in Word. 

What I did not realize all this time is that creating a rubric online has two major benefits… 1.  It is there for my students and I to access at any time so they can’t say they lost it. And 2.  It TOTALS the scores for you.  I had no idea that you could just click in the box you want, and the program would total the score for me.  You can even create a class list.  This is so much easier than having a bunch of papers and having to circle the box for each category and then going back later to total all the grades.  I could just click on the appropriate boxes as the students are giving their presentations, and they could learn their grade immediately after completion. The creation of the rubric in iRubric was also quicker than it is in Word because some of the boxes are filled in for you, such as the Superior, Excellent, Good, etc. or whatever you choose to label each column.

I think I did well with this activity.  My rubric was more detailed than usual, and I am actually going to use it with my class.  We are going to do a reading comprehension lesson on understanding the rubric and decoding the difficult vocabulary words.  I think it is beneficial to my students to expose them to all types of text structures, so this will be a perfect way to introduce them to a new type of reading.  The lesson will serve two purposes at once (reading comprehension of a rubric and understanding the rubric for their project). 

In conclusion, I am so glad that I learned about creating rubrics in programs online.  I think that this will benefit me greatly in the future as the rubrics make it easier for the students because they always have access and for me because I can just click, score, and give immediate feedback.