By: Ross Brewer, Ph.D., Exemplars President

As you begin preparing your staff to focus on the Common Core this year, rubrics should play a key role in terms of helping your teachers and students achieve success with the new standards.

 What are rubrics?

A rubric is a guide used for assessing student work. It consists of criteria that describe what is being assessed as well as different levels of performance.

Rubrics do three things:

1. The criteria in a rubric tell us what is considered important enough to assess.
2. The levels of performance in a rubric allow us to determine work that meets the standard and that which does not.
3. The levels of performance in a rubric also allow us to distinguish between different levels of student achievement among the set criteria.

Why should teachers use them?

The Common Core assessment shifts posed challenges for many students. The use of rubrics allow teachers to more easily identify these areas and address them.

For Consistency. Rubrics help teachers consistently assess students from problem to problem and with other teachers through a common lens. As a result, both teachers and students have a much better sense of where students stand with regard to meeting the standards.

 To Guide Instruction. Because rubrics focus on different dimensions of performance, teachers gain important, more precise information about how they need to adjust their teaching and learning activities to close the gap between a student’s performance and meeting the standard.

To Guide Feedback. Similarly, the criteria of the rubric guides teachers in the kind of feedback they offer students in order to help them improve performance. Here are four guiding questions that teachers can use as part of this process:

• What do we know the student knows?
• What are they ready to learn?
• What do they need to practice?
• What do they need to be retaught?

How do students benefit?

Rubrics provide students with important information about what is expected and what kind of work meets the standard. Rubrics allow students to self-assess as they work on and complete problems. Meeting the standard becomes a process in which students can understand where they have been, where they are now and where they need to go. A rubric is a guide for this journey rather than a blind walk through an assessment maze.

Important research shows that teaching students to be strong self-assessors and peer-assessors are among the most effective educational interventions that teachers can take. If students know what is expected and how to assess their effort as they complete their work, they will perform at much higher levels than students who do not have this knowledge. Similarly, if students assess one another’s work they learn from each other as they describe and discuss their solutions. Research indicates that lower performing students benefit the most from these strategies.

Rubrics to Support the Common Core.

Exemplars assessment rubric criteria reflect the Common Core Standards for Mathematical Practice and parallel the NCTM Process Standards. Exemplars rubric consists of four performance levels (Novice, Apprentice, Practitioner (meets standard) and Expert) and five assessment categories (Problem Solving, Reasoning and Proof, Communication, Connections and Representation).

To help teachers see the connection between our assessment rubric and the eight Standards for Mathematical Practice, we have developed two alignment documents:

• Math Exemplars: A Perfect Complement for the Common Core aligns each of the Standards of Mathematical Practice to the corresponding sections of the Exemplars assessment rubric.

• Common Core Standards of Mathematical Practice and the Practitioner Level of the Exemplars Math Assessment Rubric provides much more detail. It aligns the language within each Standard for Mathematical Practice to the Practitioner level of the Exemplars assessment rubric.

Which alignment one uses will depend on the intended purpose of the user.

It’s never too young to start.

Students can begin to self-assess in Kindergarten. At Exemplars, we encourage younger students to start by using a simple thumbs up, thumbs sideways, thumbs down assessment as seen in this video.

Our most popular student rubric is the Exemplars Jigsaw Rubric. This rubric has visual and  verbal descriptions of each criterion in the Exemplars Standard Rubric along with the four levels of performance. Using this rubric, students are able to:

• Self-monitor.
• Self-correct.
• Use feedback to guide their learning process.

How to introduce rubrics into the classroom.

In order for students to fully understand the rubric that is being used to assess their performance, they need to be introduced to the general concept first. Teachers often begin this process by developing rubrics with students that do not address a specific content area. Instead, they create rubrics around classroom management, playground behavior, homework, lunchroom behavior, following criteria with a substitute teacher, etc. For specific tips and examples, click here.

After building a number of rubrics with students, a teacher can introduce the Exemplars assessment rubric. To do this effectively, we suggest that teachers discuss the various criteria and levels of performance with their class. Once this has been done,  a piece of student work can be put on an overhead. Then, using our assessment rubric, ask students to assess it. Let them discuss any difference in opinion so they may better understand each criterion and the four performance levels. Going through this process helps students develop a solid understanding of what an assessment guide is and allows them to focus on the set criteria and performance levels.

Deidre Greer, professor at Columbus State University, works with students at a Title I elementary school in Georgia. Greer states that in her experience,

The Exemplars tasks have proven to be engaging for our Title I students. Use of the student-scoring rubric helps students understand exactly what is expected of them as they solve problems. This knowledge then carries over to other mathematics tasks.

At Exemplars, we believe that rubrics are an effective tool for teachers and students alike. In order to be successful with the new learning expectations set forth by the Common Core, it is important for students to understand what is required of them and for teachers to be on the same “assessment” page. Rubrics can help.

To learn more about Exemplars rubrics and to view additional samples, click here.