Grading Writing with a Rubric, by Allison Johnson, English Teacher at Lebanon High School

You have probably heard that student writing is a major component of the ELA tests that will determine the literacy score of your school this year. Maybe you have made the decision to try to incorporate writing into your classroom this year.  Maybe you have had the students write in a variety of ways with many different purposes.  Maybe you were feeling super awesome about yourself for working so much writing into your classroom.  Maybe you then looked at your desk one day, at the piles and piles of paragraphs and reports and reflections and essays sitting there waiting to be graded, and your heart sank.  If writing is so important that we are all going to try to have the students write all the time, how will we ever get through all of the grading?

            This is a question that I asked myself this summer many times as I anticipated coming back to a world where the EOC was a thing of the past and TNReady was the new challenge before me.  I knew that I was going to have to get my students writing more (and I teach English); however, I was lost on how I was going to grade all of those papers that I knew that my students needed to write. 

The answer to this problem is the writing rubric.  Rubrics are excellent tools to use in writing instruction no matter which level you teach.  They save time for you and keep your students focused on what they need to do to get a good grade on a writing assignment.  To use them effectively, it does require a little work and planning on the front end, but they save so much time in the long run.  The important thing to remember is that a rubric should make your life easier, not more difficult. 

How to use a rubric to grade student writing

1.  Create your assignment and the rubric you will use to grade it.

            Ideally, you will think about the specifics of the assignment and create your rubric before the students write it.  If you have already given an assignment, it is not too late; however, in the future, think about the rubric as you are creating the assignment.  This is better for you and for the students. 

There are three major categories of writing for the TNReady test:  opinion/argumentative, informative/explanatory, and narrative.  Hopefully your writing assignment will fit into one of these three categories.  You can use the TNReady rubrics for your grade level.  These can be found at the following link: http://support.micatime.com/teacher/classes/scoring-student-responses

These rubrics break down into four separate scores: development, focus and organization, language, and conventions.  I would recommend these for longer, more formal assignments.  You can definitely use them for every writing assignment that you do, but sometimes smaller assignments can be graded with a simpler rubric that still encompasses the majority of the elements that the TNReady test will look for.  For example, in my classes this year, students are reading an article of the week.  They receive the article on Monday and have to annotate the article by Wednesday.  On Thursday, they write a timed reflection that references the article.  They have 30 minutes to write on one of the prompts I give them.  Because they are writing these every week and they are not full-length formal essays, another teacher and I developed a condensed rubric that I use to grade them.  You can see the rubric here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hWAzdt5RcX2hbN7sX909FUrj29mc-BF6yzm_dQBAfiE/edit?usp=sharing

You might want to develop something similar for your assignment if it is a shorter piece of writing.  The main thing is to consider what exactly you want the students to show in their writing.  Do they need to reference a text?  Are you looking for a clear introduction and conclusion?  Do they need to bring in outside examples?  Develop a rubric that will work for you and the assignment.  It is easier if you start with one that has already been created, like the TNReady rubrics, and edit them if necessary, or you can google a rubric that fits with the type of writing the students are doing.  There are tons of free examples online.

*The TNReady site does not have K-2 rubrics that I can find, but your school might have a rubric that you have decided to use if you teach those grades.  If not, here are some links to rubrics for those levels that look good to me. http://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/gradesK-2-6pt-rubric.pdf

http://blogs.egusd.net/ccss/educators/ela/rubrics-k-12/

2. Give the students the rubric, and discuss what you are looking for.

            Students need clear direction on what they are supposed to do in a writing assignment, so taking time to go over the rubric will help them write better and make your job of grading much easier.  Letting them see the rubric in advance takes away any argument over grading in the future.

Again, this is helpful to do before they actually write the assignment, but if you have a stack of papers that need to be graded right now, you can still use a rubric.  Just make sure to give it to the students when you give the papers back, so they can see where they are and what they can do to improve. 

3. Find anchor papers

            The first time that you use a specific rubric, it is always helpful to set anchor papers.  These are the papers that are clearly one of the scores on the rubric.  If you have four possible scores on your rubric, you want to find four papers, one for each number on the rubric.  I have been a grader for a district-wide writing assessment, and the first thing we always did was to set and study anchor papers for each score.  Read through your stack of papers, and when you find one that stands out as a perfect example of a four, pull it out.  Do the same for each possible score.  This helps you internalize the rubric and will make grading so much easier.  When you are grading all of the papers and get to one where you can’t decide between two scores, such as a two and a three, look back at your anchor papers.  This should make it clear which score the paper should receive.

4. Score the papers and don’t write (too many) comments.

            The part of grading writing that absolutely takes the most time is writing detailed comments on each paper.  Individual comments are a great way to point out the good and the bad in student writing, and you should probably use them from time to time.  However, if you want your students writing enough for them to show actual growth in their writing abilities, providing detailed comments and marking every grammar error will take way too long.  I think it is more important for students to write often and get quick feedback than to have detailed comments on every paper. 

            If you give your students the rubric before an assignment and make them familiar with it, then the comments are built right in.  There is no need to write that they didn’t develop their ideas enough; that should be stated in the rubric, and they can look at their score and get that information.  I still write comments on papers (because I just can’t stand not to sometimes), but I try to not write things that they can look at the rubric and see for themselves.

5.  Assign a numerical grade to each score on the rubric

            After you have given each paper a score, you have to figure out how that will translate to a grade in the gradebook.  There are two methods that I use regularly.  The first one is assigning a numerical grade to each score.  For my articles of the week assignment, if a student gets a four on the rubric, he or she gets a 100 in the gradebook.  A three is a 90 and so on.  I think this is fast and fair.  Based on this scale, even a paper of that scored a one will still get a 70 in the gradebook.  That might be a little too lenient for your taste, but you can adjust it accordingly.  Another method I have used is to group the papers by score.  On an assignment where I am going to use the full TNReady rubric, the scores could range from a four (getting a one on each section) to a 16 (getting a four on each section).  I sort all the papers into groups by score.  The top pile gets A’s, the next A-minuses, etc.  I also believe this to be fair because if the highest score was a 13 out of 16, those papers get the A’s.  It basically works like a curve. Whatever method you choose, just make sure that you are comfortable with whatever numerical grades the students end up with.

6. Give the papers back with the score, and let students reflect

            Something that just drives me bananas is when I hand back a paper, sometimes with comments lovingly written all over it, and a student takes one look at the grade, crumples it up, and throws it in the trash.  To prevent this problem, I often plan a reflection activity on the day I hand back papers.  You could have your students look back at the rubric, list things that they did that they shouldn’t have and look to the next score up and list things that they could do next time to get a higher score.  You could also have them pick one paragraph and rewrite it based on what the rubric says.  Any activity that gets them to look at the rubric and reflect on their own writing will translate into better performance on the next writing assignment.