Customer Reviews

Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment

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Although I believe this book was geared toward K-12, it is applicable to all levels of teaching. If you are like me, and feel a bit unsettled trying to quantify and fit students' writing into three or four categories on a rubric, Maja Wilson lets you know you are not alone. Rubrics were supposedly designed to make grading students' papers easier, as well as to justify an instructor's grades. Like Alfie Kohn says in the Foreward, we really should be questioning anything that is designed to make, what I would argue is a very individual process, "easy." Quality is indeed "more than the sum of its rubricized parts," and I think before we, as teachers, look for an easier way to grade, we need to look at the how's and why's of what we are doing. Or think about it this way--what if you were being observed by another faculty member deciding your tenure--would you want them to use a rubric to judge your performance, or would you want them to engage in a conversation with you about your work before deciding your future? I think what Maja Wilson is asking of teachers is similar--that we engage in a dialogue with our students about their work, rather than ending all possible chance of conversation by assigning their work to some "neat" and "tidy" category on a rubric.

I highly recommend this book if you are looking for an alternative to rubrics in writing assessment.

This book is quickly becoming my bible for writing assessment. While it is true that Wilson does not offer in-depth insight into alternatives for content area writing and focuses mainly on creative writing, this is because she is an English teacher and is still struggling with alternatives in her own classroom. What she does do is ask her readers to look at their own "deepest convictions about the complexities of the writing process." What are we doing in the classroom that is violating those convictions? Her analysis by no means applies only to English teachers, but to any teacher who will ever expect her students to write anything in the classroom as well as anyone concerned about the standardized movement toward teaching in general. She helps her readers understand the history of writing assessment and how we came to where we are today. She points out the inconsistency within the pedagogical movement focusing on the writing process (a positive step) that still chooses to use standardized forms of writing assessment. Her writing is engaging as she takes us on a journey exploring her own concerns about writing assessment, sprinkled with personal narratives and examples of excellent student writing that would score poorly on any rubric. This book is not meant to be an ultimate resolution; rather, it forces us to engage in a conversation that challenges traditional teaching practices and encourages us to be subversive in our own classrooms. Buy this book if you have even the slightest suspicion that "something about rubrics violates your deepest convictions about the complexities of the writing process." You won't regret it.

You have to give it up to a writer who discusses rubrics in writing assessment and Michael Ondaatje in the same text. I dare anyone to name another education theorist who has the intellectual flexibility to do the same.

Maja Wilson recognizes some of the most important features of a writer: we are fallible. We are human. We are given to appraise writing according to our own consciences. Our qualities as a writer and the things we value in writing are not prescriptive, but are derived from different social circumstances and person experiences. Writing values are not universal, and they certainly cannot be canonized and placed in neat boxes, dissected and labeled for professional conveniences.

Wilson is delightfully plainspoken and candid. This is a thoughtful examination of an educational practice not long for this world.

Maja Wilson tries hard to argue against rubrics. She begins with a student paper that has merit in her eyes, but would be judged poorly by a typical rubric. She makes a good point about how actual readers, not standardized rubrics, are needed for writing assessment. Wilson's writing is energized by actual stories of her own writing and writing by her students. Wilson's solution is a return to the golden age of Nancie Atwell and personalized "kitchen table" writing, when writers wrote for their own purposes and real readers gave feedback to them. The book ends with a nice explanation of how writers can filter positive and negative feedback from readers to help them revise their writing.

The biggest problem with this text is that Wilson looks extensively at personal writing and very little at content area writing. I think rubrics are very helpful in content area writing where writers are learning the rhetoric of different professional conversations - science, history, political science and so on. The book lacks an honest discussion of the benefits of rubrics, especially the fact that many students appreciate the guidelines that rubrics provide for writing assignments. Another big problem is that Wilson suggests that assessment needs to focus on the process, not the product. Outside of school, however, it is the product that gets assessed. Many writers need a lot of scotch in their writing process, but it doesn't matter because readers just care about the final product. Think about sports or music performance or financial investing - its not the process that counts, its the performance.

I loved this book. I thought rubrics were okay to use in grading writing papers until a colleague recommended this book. The sum of the parts does not equal the whole. If rubrics were truly a foolproof way to evaluate writing, then absolutely anyone could be a book editor.
I found the history of rubrics to be illuminating. It is important to understand how and why rubrics were established in the first place. Evaluators would love to be able to make writing as quantifiable as math, but it just doesn't translate.
I think this book speaks more to middle and high school teachers than to elementary teachers. In the beginning, students need to master the physical structure of writing pieces, but as their writing evolves, so must the feedback we, as teachers, must evolve.
A standard rubric for me contained topic development, organization, supporting detail and mechanics. I thought I was covering everything. Yet I would never evaluate a book I was reading using those categories. I also thought back to the best writing teacher I ever had. He managed to help me improve my writing and give me powerful feedback without ever using a rubric.
Is there a place for rubrics? Absolutely. For me, I will always keep the basic structure of what writing pieces need in mind, but I will focus most of my feedback on how my students can make sure that they're saying what they really want to say and how to become more powerful readers and writers.

This book challenges teachers of writing to step outside the safe world that assessment rubrics have created and face and respond to the wonderful, dangerous, messiness of the real writing that students produce. Ms Wilson shows how a Rubric is a grid that pretends to encompass all writing but in doing so can intrude on the relationship between student and teacher. In other words, instead of asking questions to your student about their feelings about their grandmother's death, you say ,"I like how your voice comes through in the part where your describe your grandmother's death. Great details, too."
Benchmarks that compare one piece of writing to another, assume that all writing can be classified into similar uniform categories, i.e. organization, ideas, etc. This assumption values uniformity over diversity. Teachers like Maja Wilson and the incomparable Nancy Atwell are like the character Neo in the movie the Matrix. They come to show us that we are living a comfortable lie. Real writing is far more messy, complex, and unique than the generic categories created by the standards movement. When English teachers finally wake up to this they will begin to teach in ways that value complexity and richness and scorn, the bleak, bland consistency of the writing rubric. Rubrics will never replace real teaching.

Wake up Neo!

Maja Wilson provides a thorough and enjoyable overview of rubrics and their shortfalls. Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment challenges writing teachers to rethink their approach to the teaching and the assessment of writing while acknowledging the commitment necessary for grading the portfolios for 125 students. Wilson's real world examples and easy to read writing creates an informative and enjoyable read. Also, she removes the statistics and their manipulation that we commonly find in a study, and replaces them with real people and real faces--she humanizes the assessment of writing assessment.

Excellent source for teachers. Not only does the text give insights to using rubrics, the material and rubric information crosses all curriculums and types of projects and writing.
Achowalogen (High School and University English Educator)