Instructional rubrics

Sundeen, T. H. (2014). Instructional rubrics: Effects of presentation options on writing quality. Assessing Writing, 21, 74-88. doi: 10.1016/j.asw.2014.03.003

Background

The authors stated that rubrics were often used to evaluate expressive writing in secondary schools. However, they pointed out that teachers did not often use them for explicit instruction.

Aims

The study examined the effects of using a writing rubric for explicit instruction on the writing quality of student compositions.

Sample

The participants were 89 Grade 10 Caucasian students from seven classes in a suburban American high school and three teachers. They comprised 48 female and 41 male students, who did not receive any special education services in their classes. Prior to the intervention, the teachers had not used writing rubrics for instruction, but had used them for grading.

Method

The state standardized writing assessment results of all participants were used to determine the initial writing ability of the students who wrote three persuasive essays over six weeks. Each class wrote one essay without explicit instruction on the criteria in the writing rubric given as a handout prior to writing, another essay with direct instruction on the rubric criteria, and the third essay with no rubric handout. These three conditions were rotated among the three classes. A 6-point writing rubric was used to score student compositions. The criteria in the writing rubric comprised ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. To examine the effects of using an instructional rubric, differences in writing rubric scores were examined across all conditions using an analysis of covariance repeated measures.

Findings

The authors found that when the students were given an instructional rubric before the writing task or when they received explicit instruction on how they should use the rubric, there was a significant increase in their writing scores. There was no significant difference between the condition where the students were given an instructional rubric and the condition where they were taught writing using the rubric.

Implications

The authors recommended that students be taught to write using an instructional rubric or that they be given one prior to writing. They also recommended that students be provided clear and detailed expectations of what is required for their writing projects so that students can understand what is expected of them.

Original article retrieved from ScienceDirect.