Introduction

The Teachers Guide to the Aventa Learning Scoring Rubrics

Aventa Learning uses holistic scoring guides (rubrics) to guide the general scoring of writing assignments, discussions, and oral assignments. The rubrics are provided to both the students and the teacher to guide them in expectations of quality, and they can be used for almost all assignments as is. For specific assignments, a rubric can be altered to meet a specific educational goal. For example, a specific writing assignment may focus on a student's use of organizational skills more than on sentence variety or conventions.

Holistic Grading

Some teachers may be accustomed to rubrics that break down scoring to a very specific level for different elements. For example, a writing rubric may specify a specific number of points for grammar and a specific number of points for organization. Most educators today believe that kind of scoring is unwieldy and counterproductive. In holistic grading, the teacher considers the overall performance and assigns it a single grade based upon all elements combined.

In addition, teachers who are not used to this kind of rubric may be surprised by a supposed "vagueness" of the qualitative language used to describe student performance, and they may be looking for quantitative measures, such as a number of required paragraphs or sentences. They argue that quantitative measures are more reliable, meaning that the score can be justified objectively and without judgment.

Reliability and Validity

Quantitative terms in rubrics do indeed increase the level of reliability in a test, but they do it at great cost. Those measures are usually not valid-that is, they do not accurately reflect a quality performance in the "real world." When we think of high quality writers, we do not think of the numbers of sentences in their paragraphs or the number of paragraphs in the essay. We do not measure the quality of a person's contributions to a discussion by the number of posts the person contributes, but by the quality of thought in those posts.

Rubrics focusing on quantitative measures have actually been shown to diminish student performance. When students learn they are being scored by quantitative measures rather than qualitative measures, they focus on quantity rather than quality. Knowing that a paragraph with seven simple, basic sentences scores higher than a paragraph with four brilliant, complex sentences, they will adopt a simple, choppy writing style, the opposite of the instructional goal. Knowing that they need to make exactly three responses in a discussion for a top score, they will produce three meaningless responses, and the entire discussion will be a waste of everyone's time.

Research has indicated that teachers can use valid, holistic rubrics with a high degree of reliability. The College Board, for example, uses such rubrics in scoring Advanced Placement Exams and the new writing section of the SAT tests. Advanced Placement free response questions are scored on a 9-point rubric, and multiple scorers will almost always give the same score to the same student response.

We must also recognize that a rubric that is too specific in its guidelines stifles the creative student. A student who presents an outstanding response to a prompt should not be penalized because it does not perfectly match a preconceived model.

Summary

Please review the scoring rubrics carefully, and be sure to measure student work in accordance to the concepts as they are defined.