AI-generated rubrics can quickly boost student writing outcomes
As we come to the end of another busy year, it’s worth reflecting on what has and hasn’t worked well with our learners. We all know that feedback that is Fast, Multi-modal and Actioned has a massive effect on student outcomes. When feedback is mostly verbal/formative (while the learner completes a task) and then is predominantly written at the end (summative) when the learner has completed the task (and too many don’t finish), the impact is significantly reduced. In addition, less confident students may often give up, and more confident students may finish early without extending themselves.
Well-designed rubrics can achieve the following outcomes:
Develop a classroom climate that is more focused on effective learning and success (as opposed to just task completion and compliance).
Support students who are currently less confident and extend those who are more confident.
Reward all students with marks for evidence of effective learning, task completion and compliance (eg surface features).
Generate a “Learning to Learn” culture in which formative feedback is used to develop meta-cognitive awareness, enhanced work and learning outcomes and celebrate the development of capabilities.
Here is what a few students have recently said about this!
“My writing has improved because of how my teacher does fast feedback for us - she uses a rubric with points”
“We get instant feedback along the way that helps us improve our work on our own”
“The rubrics make us think more about our writing and how to make it better”
Any educational strategy can amplify or reduce cognitive overload for learners, and rubric design is no different - here are a few quick tips to design effective rubrics for writing:
Split the marks between the following 3 aspects:
Task completion - eg engaging with the task at a deeper level and demonstrating understanding and expertise.
Habit of learning - eg acting on Feedback, persistence, collaborating well with others
Surface feature compliance - eg spelling and punctuation
In addition, here are a few general tips for effective rubric design:
No more than 4 criteria
Design to encourage and reward multiple turn-ins
Design to challenge/improve existing learning and work habits
Reward evidence of learning as well as task completion.
Design to support those at the bottom and extend to students at the top
Differentiate by time, task, rubric - or just by using the phrase “at least” in the task instructions
Although it might take 3-5 minutes to manually make such a Rubric in Google Classroom, there is now an even better option, using Gemini - here’s a quick video to demonstrate how this works.
