Developing K-8 Common Rubrics to Measure Student Growth and Teacher Effectiveness: Working With Teachers to Create Evaluation Tools That Inform Instruction

• In Event: The Challenges and Possibilities for Instructionally Valuable Performance Assessments in High-Stakes Environments

Abstract

Purposes and Perspectives
Discipline-specific learning progressions have the power to both chart student progress and inform student and teacher next steps. Rubrics, when well-designed as a series of interconnected benchmarks year-over-year, can construct a kind of learning progression that also serves as a scoring tool. This project aimed, among other goals, to engage teachers, partnered with academic professionals, to produce a sequence of “common rubrics,” aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), that would apply across a variety of present and future performance tasks. This set of rubrics would then help to establish a standard for rigor for any tasks associated with the project. Given that these tasks were intended for use not for student but for teacher evaluation, the involvement of teachers in this process was crucial. The academic partners and the New York City Department of Education hoped that the development of common rubrics with analytic descriptors at all levels K-12 would both support teachers’ greater understanding of the CCSS and support student and teacher growth.

Methods and Topics of Inquiry
The design of rubrics aligned to the CCSS requires a willingness to unpack the standards: to think through not just the "letter of the law" of the standards, as they are articulated on the page, but to consider what students need to be able to do - the requisite steps in reading, thinking and writing - to truly demonstrate proficiency in a given standard. These instructional questions change in tone when they are in the context of a teacher effectiveness assessment that will have high stakes for the teachers. The rubrics needed to be analytic enough to provide instructional guidance, but succinct enough that growth in a student’s performance in any dimension would be clear to a scorer. This paper discusses the results of co-developing high stakes grades K-8 tasks and rubrics with teachers and the teachers’ union, while following State guidelines.

Other inquiry topics that affected rubric and task design included the question of text complexity: there are competing interpretations of what constitutes an appropriately complex text at a given grade level, and of the role of text complexity in an on-demand writing assessment. The blending of reading and writing in a single task also impacts the development of rubrics: if a student who cannot read the text is shut out of the task completely, this may skew results for the students and, in this particular assessment construct, for the teacher.

Conclusions
This pilot study demonstrated that engaging teachers in designing and piloting performance assessments with associated common rubrics helped teachers gain increased content knowledge, assessment literacy and confidence in interpreting data. In this climate of assessment, this seems an important point to publicize. The full effect of these assessments on teachers, however, won’t be clear until they are implemented within the high stakes reality that is New York State. Under those conditions, teachers administering these assessments may have such a different experience that they will not gain the same benefits.

Authors

• Lucy Calkins, Teacher's College

• Audra Robb, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Janet Steinberg, Teachers College, Columbia University