Teaching In The Margins:
Commenting On Student Writing

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Take a look at the sample rubric borrowed from From “Optimizing Faculty Use of Writing as a Learning Tool in Geoscience Education” by Jon A. Leydens and Paul Santi, in press at The Journal of Geoscience Education.

Its most successful feature is the careful distinction in the evaluative range running across the table for each criterion. A student receiving this rubric with his or her paper would be able to tell pretty quickly which criteria needed more attention or where the student can best spend time on a subsequent paper. What the rubric could do still more clearly is define the criteria themselves more fully. As teachers move from task to task, they may, in fact, want to assess how students demonstrate their understanding of concepts. But a quick update of the rubric for a specific writing assignment could help students see whether the assignment calls for demonstrating understanding of new concepts, linking new concepts with material already covered, extending classwork into independent work, and so on.

Teachers can provide this fuller definition of the key criteria in a more detailed sheet with the assignment itself, or they can cover that material in the classroom. But students will get more out of the feedback on the rubric if teachers remember to give students concrete definitions of key criteria.

One additional element might also help students. In this rubric, all four criteria seem to be weighted equally. When that's the case, you don't need to provide the weightings. But if you want to shift the emphasis among criteria as you give subsequent assignments or if you simply want to give more weight to a particular criterion, you should reflect that assessment practice on the rubric itself.