Sample Rubric for Classroom Research (Turn Your Teaching Into Publications #7)

A rubric provides a stepwise progression from entry-level demonstration of a skill all the way through to top-level exemplification of the skill. A rubric looks like this:

Now, designing your own rubric is simple: begin with a description of the highest level of achievement of the goal you’ve chosen. It’s essential that the description you give is actionable. I can’t write, “Students analyze perfectly without making any mistakes. Top notch.” This is too vague. How will students analyze? What sorts of things will they do, and how will they do them? 

Here is an example that I’ve created by beginning with the “evaluation competency” from the Association of American Colleges and Universities website. (They have a whole pile of validated rubrics to choose from. You can probably find what you’re looking for at www.aacu.org.)

 

TOP LEVEL: Information is taken from a source (video, exposition, journal, report) with enough evaluation to develop a comprehensive analysis in which students identify the most essential details for understanding the psychological phenomenon. Alternative interpretations are questioned thoroughly.

 

Don’t worry about getting the wording perfect right away. You can always go back and make changes as you fill out the rubric.

Now, if I were to ask students to do this right out of the gate on day one, then I would get all sorts of horrible answers—probably a combination of students giving cliché and meaningless sorts of responses (e.g., “The boy was sad because sadness is a real emotion that should be taken seriously by everybody no matter what.”)

In fact, I’ll only expect maybe 5% of students to reach this level by the end of the semester. The real key will be designing interim steps of achievement that are challenging but not impossible.

 

START HERE          Do 5th                         Do 4th             DO 3rd                       DO 2nd

TOP LEVEL	Benchmark 3	Benchmark 2	Benchmark 1	NO EFFORT
Information is taken from a source (video, exposition, journal, report) with enough evaluation to develop a comprehensive analysis in which students identify the most essential details for understanding the psychological phenomenon. Alternative interpretations are questioned thoroughly.			Student identifies information that might be important, but analysis of it is weak, vague, or ambiguous. Alternative interpretations are ignored.	Student does not attempt to answer the question.

 

 At the lowest end, choose something that students will be able to do on day one. You want to give them the idea that they belong there. I set the bar very low: “Student gives no effort at all.” Anybody will look at that and immediately think, “Heck, I can do that!”

The next step will identify an action upon which analysis is based, but which by itself does not meet the definition of analysis. For this I’ve chosen, “Student identifies information that might be important, but the analysis is weak, vague, or ambiguous. Alternative intepretations are ignored.”

It would be very easy for a student to give an answer that satisfies this level of achievement (e.g., “I noticed that the sales associate scoffed and made a face, which can sometimes be horrible customer service”) but there is a lot in this description of the skill that they might not understand. In other words, they will reach this level without knowing what they have or haven’t done. The next step will be to understand the ways in which their response is deficient. (To be fair, I can identify these easily because I’ve spent so much time working with students as they navigate these skills.) The key words in this First Benchmark are:

·      Weak (Follow-up question: Is it necessary to use the conditional phrase, “…which can sometimes be…”?)

·      Vague (Follow-up question: How can you clarify what you mean by customer service??)

·      Ambiguous (i.e., “general;” Follow-up question: There are lots of faces a person can make that would make for poor customer service; what specifically did this face communicate?)

I can expect at least two weeks going over examples of weak/strong responses, vague/clear responses, and ambiguous/specific responses. By the end of this period, students will be really good at applying these basic concepts and using them while interpreting all sorts of behaviors, thoughts, intelligence levels, emotions, and so on. But they will also be building up to the much more sophisticated skill of analysis without realizing it.

The Rubric Makes it Easy to Measure Improvement

To assess whether your teaching is effective, you want to show that students are improving the chosen skill. Using the above rubric I’ve started (the middle interim steps are superfluous at this point), I will want to show something like this:

In the sketched diagram, you can imagine students starting out barely above the absolute minimum expectation but scarcely capable of more. Then after days and weeks of building towards the skill, some have mastered it and others are struggling. The average score has improved measurably. In the above table, the lowest column might be given a score of 0. Then working my way towards the left, I could assign ascending numerical values 1, 2, 3, and 4. I might even say, “Students entered with an average score of 0.8 on the scale of analytic skill development that I have developed. After fourteen weeks of dedicated practice, student scores improved to 2.2. 10% of students reached 4.0.