Reconsidering the Use of Scoring Rubrics in Biology Instruction

Abstract

Scoring rubrics are widely employed across content areas and grade levels, including in high school biology classes. Besides regular external use within accountability systems, educators also have advanced their instructional use inside classrooms. In recent years, a consensus appears to be emerging in the educational literature that instructional use of rubrics is beneficial for student learning, and numerous examples in the research and practitioner literature establish their importance in teachers’ planning, instruction, and assessment. We examine this assumption through close analysis of students’ use of a scoring rubric in a high school biology classroom. We explore how instructional use of a scoring rubric influences biology teaching and learning activities, what messages about knowledge and learning such use conveys to students, and what influence such use may have on students’ emergent understandings of what constitutes quality in biological thinking and practice. Our analysis suggests that instructional use of scoring rubrics can actually undermine the very learning it is intended to support. We discuss an alternative way to help students understand what constitutes high-quality work, and we draw implications for science teacher education.

Motivating and Shaping Scientific Argumentation in Lab Reports

“…Many of the rubric items asked for specific formatting (e.g., the title must include a dependent and independent variable), and overall, the instructions emphasized the need to follow directions carefully. This assessment structure can activate a “checklist” approach to writing ( Tang et al. , 2015 ) and can explain why lower-level reports often included rhetorical features such as lists of sources of error or ideas for future studies that seemed tacked on and disconnected from the rest of the argument.…”

What Happens After the Intervention? Results From Teacher Professional Development in Employing Mathematical Reasoning Tasks and a Supporting Rubric

“…Rubrics help teachers evaluate complex competencies assessed in authentic performance assessments, such as written compositions, oral presentations, or science projects (Montgomery, 2000;Bradford et al, 2015;Tang et al, 2015;de Leeuw, 2016). Rubrics describe performance expectations by listing criteria and describing levels of quality (Brookhart, 2018).…”

Teaching Assistant Attention and Responsiveness to Student Reasoning in Written Work

“…Rubrics that give weight to stylistic and genre-specific conventions of writing in science will focus student and TA attention on those conventions. Even when rubrics include both stylistic and substantive items, students and instructors may gravitate toward style and format (e.g., use of correct terminology, figure formatting), because those aspects are more straightforward to apply and identify ( Tang et al ., 2015 ). Both student and TA attention is limited.…”