Rubrics written according to developmental principles can be seen as just another random assessment template choice teachers make if they’re in the mood to be trendy. But there are plenty of serious organisations that support them.
The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority promoted them and did a lot of work on them through its Formative Assessment projects. Unfortunately, that project wasn’t entirely successful. Our view is that this was probably because it was under-resourced. Teaching people to write progressions according to developmental principles is harder than the time and support teachers were given.
AERO also presents rubric use as best practice in assessment. Research suggests that rubrics are most powerful when used for formative assessment, including self-assessment and peer assessment. No doubt they can generate a score as well, but generating scores is not as useful for individual student learning.
Strangely, there has never been a small research project comparing analytic but not developmentally written rubrics with developmental rubrics. We have looked into funding that research ourselves, but it costed out at about $20,000, which sadly is not sitting around at the moment.
Well-written rubrics improve teaching clarity, feedback, learning goals, self-judgement, direct instruction, formative assessment, and help suggest appropriately challenging goals. That is a pretty impressive list of things affected by one assessment practice.
So why has that research not been done? The research centre that originally developed the model has gone in a different direction, so no one there seems especially interested in spending $20,000 on it.
If you show someone a developmentally written rubric and an analytic but not developmental one, they can usually see pretty quickly that one is doing a different job from the other.
The three main selling points in our head are:
- They are quicker and easier to mark, and more consistent between teachers
- They are easier for students to use for self-assessment, which supports self-regulated learning and goal-setting
- They can support the sequencing of instructional material based on difficulty
People assume the curriculum already does this, but if you have ever tried to translate it into a real learning progression, sadly, it does not.
If you look at the critiques by Learning First, Australian curricula do not do a strong job of describing increasing sophistication of content knowledge or skill development.
The old Victorian High Impact Teaching Strategies might not be the current fad anymore, but developmental rubrics line up pretty sweetly with almost all of them: goal setting, lesson structure, explicit teaching, worked examples, feedback, metacognition, differentiation.
A well-written rubric shows what progress looks like, not just what success looks like at the end. That changes what teachers can teach, in what order, and how students can regulate their own learning.
A scoping review has shown that when teachers use rubrics to support formative assessment, teacher practice and student outcomes are both enhanced. Rad.
Students start thinking in terms of “How do I get to the next level?” rather than “Where did I lose marks?” It helps them think developmentally rather than in a fixed way, just seeking the next mark.
Certainly, the senior schooling system in Australia does not necessarily promote that mindset.
We have had no end of Year 12 teachers say, “Yes, your rubrics are great for Years 7 to 10. But when students get to Year 12, they’re required to use these different norm-based, comparative, vague, adjective-laden performance descriptors. So why should I bother?”
Our answer is always this: students learn more when learning is well sequenced, feedback is targeted, and the next step is easy to act on.
[Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash]
