The Advantages of Rubrics.

Posted by

 Licda Cleopatra Noel Drummond

As teachers of English as a Second Language it is necessary to understand what is a rubric, that is the reason way we define it as a scoring guide that seeks to evaluate a student's performance based on the sum of a full range of criteria rather than a single numerical score.

Also we can say that is an authentic assessment tool used to measure students' work. Rubrics can be created for any content area, once we developed a rubric they can be modified easily for various grade levels.

It is important to use rubrics in our daily ESL work and why do we use them, many experts believe that rubrics improve students' end products and therefore increase learning. When students receive rubrics beforehand, they understand how they wil be evaluated and can prepare accordingly.

There are many advantages to using rubrics:

• Teachers can increase the quality of their direct instruction by providing focus, emphasis, and attention to particular details as a model for students.
• Students have explicit guidelines regarding teacher expectations.
• Students can use rubrics as a tool to develop their abilities.
• Teachers can reuse rubrics for various activities.

The rubrics can be analytic and holistic, but what is the difference between analytic and holistic rubrics? The analytic rubrics identify and assess components of a finished product and the holistic rubrics assess students work as a whole.

1. Neither the analytic nor the holistic rubrics is better than the other one.

2. Consider your students and grader(s) when deciding which type to use.

3. For modeling, present to your students anchor products or exemples of products at various levels of development.

What is a weighted rubrics?

A weighted rubrics is an analytic rubric in which certain concepts are judged more heavily than others. Some advantages of this kind of rubric is that it permits a clearly communication, also it focuses on specific aspects of a project.

Finally I will say that weighted rubrics are useful for explicitly describing to students and parents what concepts take priority over others for certain activities.