opinion essay rubric

Rubrics | Opinion | Rubrics - Opinion

Opinion – Rubric

Read Time 2 mins | Mar 25, 2020 11:15:42 PM | Written by: Toolbox

  What Is a Rubric?

A rubric is a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work, or “what counts” (for example, purpose, organization, details, voice, and mechanics are often what count in a piece of writing); it also articulates gradations of quality for each criterion, from excellent to poor. The term defies a dictionary definition, but it seems to have established itself, so I continue to use it (learnweb.harvard.edu). Rubrics have a large appeal for educators and their students. They identify a set of criteria, offer score points, and provide descriptors for all content area work. In addition, they can take the subjectivity out of grading or scoring by offering a consistent approach to assessing the work. A well-created rubric is a tool for learning and for assessing. Students like rubrics because they know exactly what they have to do to earn a high score. It also allows the teacher and student to come together and provide specific feedback based on a learning objective. Teachers like them because it cuts down on lengthy narrative comments. Parents like them because they know exactly what their child needs to do in order to be successful.In order for a rubric to be usable it needs to match the instruction taking place! For this reason, we designed genre specific rubrics. The link below is used for opinion writing. The rubric breaks down the skills of opinion writing and gives a score of 1-4 for each component. What I love is that I can use just one section of the rubric during the year as I instruct, or I can use it as a whole when we are creating process pieces or when I give an assessment. These rubrics are also aligned to the standards so I know I am teaching with fidelity to those standards.

Essay Rubric

About this printout

This rubric delineates specific expectations about an essay assignment to students and provides a means of assessing completed student essays.

Teaching with this printout

More ideas to try.

Grading rubrics can be of great benefit to both you and your students. For you, a rubric saves time and decreases subjectivity. Specific criteria are explicitly stated, facilitating the grading process and increasing your objectivity. For students, the use of grading rubrics helps them to meet or exceed expectations, to view the grading process as being “fair,” and to set goals for future learning. In order to help your students meet or exceed expectations of the assignment, be sure to discuss the rubric with your students when you assign an essay. It is helpful to show them examples of written pieces that meet and do not meet the expectations. As an added benefit, because the criteria are explicitly stated, the use of the rubric decreases the likelihood that students will argue about the grade they receive. The explicitness of the expectations helps students know exactly why they lost points on the assignment and aids them in setting goals for future improvement.

• Routinely have students score peers’ essays using the rubric as the assessment tool. This increases their level of awareness of the traits that distinguish successful essays from those that fail to meet the criteria. Have peer editors use the Reviewer’s Comments section to add any praise, constructive criticism, or questions.
• Alter some expectations or add additional traits on the rubric as needed. Students’ needs may necessitate making more rigorous criteria for advanced learners or less stringent guidelines for younger or special needs students. Furthermore, the content area for which the essay is written may require some alterations to the rubric. In social studies, for example, an essay about geographical landforms and their effect on the culture of a region might necessitate additional criteria about the use of specific terminology.
• After you and your students have used the rubric, have them work in groups to make suggested alterations to the rubric to more precisely match their needs or the parameters of a particular writing assignment.
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Rick Hess Straight Up

Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform. Read more from this blog.

The Trouble With ‘Equitable Grading’

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I’ve been having a series of conversations with Joe Feldman, the author of Grading for Equity , about efforts to promote equitable grading. In a recent conversation, Joe and I discussed a recent report by Meredith Coffey and Adam Tyner of the Fordham Institute, in which they offered a scathing take on the evidence used to justify equitable grading. Joe was fairly critical of their conclusions, which prompted Coffey and Tyner to pen a letter. I think it’s a serious, hard-hitting contribution to this timely debate and thought it worth sharing with you. Coffey is a senior research associate at Fordham with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, while Tyner is Fordham’s national research director with a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Here’s what they had to say.

We’re glad that you and Joe Feldman took the time to discuss our recent analysis of “equity grading” reforms. Like Feldman, we value educational equity, so we’re also glad he noticed that we agree with him on some equity-oriented grading reforms, like eliminating most extra credit and using rubrics to score assignments. Far from being “ironic,” as he called it, our agreement on those points is entirely consistent with our recommendation to “take the best parts from both traditional and equity-oriented grading approaches.”

Still, our policy brief urges readers to think again about other grading reforms that could undermine students’ motivation and learning. Though our brief isn’t specifically about Feldman’s work, we’ve closely followed your series with him, and over the course of your conversations, we’ve been left scratching our heads at a number of claims that Feldman made to you.

For example, Feldman told you that “abolishing penalties for late work” is not part of his program. Yet on Page 111 of his book, he lists “penalizing for lateness (tardiness or submitting work past the deadline)” as a biased practice. Then, on Page 115, he writes, “Reducing grades for late work both creates inaccuracy and violates our bias-resistant Driving Principle.” He specifies no alternative penalties, other than on Pages 213–14, where he mentions that “students may need formal reflections” on lateness—which he may believe is sufficient to address these problems.

Feldman also told you that prohibiting penalties for cheating and plagiarism is not part of his program. But “punishing cheating in the grade” is listed as another inequitable practice in his book, again on Page 111. In fairness, he does suggest some mild nongrade penalties, but they are poorly defined, such as “withdrawing some privilege or responsibility,” and he does not address how to implement them equitably. The bottom line is that his system prohibits grade penalties for cheating without putting any real deterrent in their place.

Additionally, Feldman said in your first exchange that the idea of “endless retakes” was “hyperbolic shorthand.” Yet on Page 175 of his book, he says: “If a student’s mastery of the content is important for success on future content, then you might want to give retakes until students have demonstrated necessary understanding.” Astonishingly, he proclaims that “Most schools and districts allow grade changes after a semester is over, so doesn’t that explicitly allow, perhaps invite, a student who wants to learn unmastered material to continue learning beyond the term and have her grade reflect that learning?” Suggesting that students continue revising their work after the semester ends sure sounds like “endless retakes” to us.

Feldman also mischaracterized our statement that “affluent students often have built-in mechanisms that hold them accountable, such as involved parents,” saying that we are talking about differences in parental expectations. But we did not mention expectations: We mentioned involvement . Moreover, he alleges that we make our claim “based on no evidence.” In fact, in our brief, the words “involved parents” link to this peer-reviewed study , which shows that more affluent parents are indeed more involved in school activities (see the study’s Table 4).

In general, we worry that Feldman just isn’t giving you the straight talk that you and your readers expect.

But perhaps the most troubling of Feldman’s claims is his repeated assertion that his program does not contribute to grade inflation. In fact, throughout Chapter 7 of his book, Feldman supports “minimum grading,” more commonly known as the “ no-zero ” policy. With this practice, teachers are prevented from assigning students any grade under 50 percent, often regardless of whether the student attempted the task . If a student who would otherwise have earned a zero, a 25, or a 45 suddenly gets a 50, that will necessarily increase (read: inflate ) that student’s grade without changes in the quality of the student’s work. Feldman is free to argue that these policies are worth considering, but he cannot argue that they do not contribute to inflating grades, particularly for lower-performing students. Most people would recognize that removing penalties for late work and cheating is also likely to inflate grades.

The research base on which Feldman’s work rests is thin. As far as we can tell, his assertion that his program “decreases both grade inflation and grade deflation” relies on a single analysis that his company conducted internally for use in its marketing materials. Feldman said that the document shows that “teachers who use equitable grading practices assign grades that are closer to students’ scores on standardized tests.” But it is impossible to evaluate this claim based on the document he cites, which includes very little data, fails to define key terms (e.g., “assessment consistency”), and offers no information about the statistical models that produced the results. (Incredibly, considering the nature of this document, Feldman criticized us for not including it in our review of the research on grading practices.) Based on our reading of the document as researchers, it is entirely possible that grades and test scores are less aligned after their program. What we do know is that even Feldman’s company’s own analysis offers exactly zero evidence that students learned more after the implementation of his program.

Perhaps his most harmful recommendations are those that remove mechanisms to discourage student procrastination. Feldman argues against not only late penalties but also grades for homework and, in fact, grades for any practice assignments. Virtually every teacher knows that students learn more when they have some shorter-term, smaller-bite, lower-stakes assignments. But those assignments should not have zero stakes , or students will quickly realize that they are effectively optional. Enforcing deadlines and limiting retakes are critical pedagogical tools. All of this, in addition to no-zero policies and failing to dock points for late work, lower expectations and academic standards, despite Feldman’s confident assertions to the contrary. In the words of one public school teacher , equity grading “encouraged [students] to do the minimum.”

If Mr. Feldman cares as much about preserving high expectations and combating grade inflation as he claims, he ought to stop advocating policies that “encourage the minimum” and make it harder for schools to maintain high standards.

The opinions expressed in Rick Hess Straight Up are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Critic’s Notebook

What Ethan Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’ Gets Right About Flannery O’Connor

Those familiar with her menagerie of grotesques, her views of Southern society, her tortured faith and inner contradictions will get what his film is doing.

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By Alissa Wilkinson

Nobody’s ever really known what to do with Mary Flannery O’Connor. They didn’t know when she was alive, and they haven’t known since she died in 1964, at 39, after years of battling through lupus to write her nervy, weird stories about Southerners, sin, religion and the God to whom she prayed so fervently. Her mother, Regina, with whom O’Connor lived for the last third of her life in Milledgeville, Ga., once asked her daughter’s publisher, Robert Giroux, if he couldn’t “get Flannery to write about nice people.” He couldn’t. Not that he would try.

The screen adaptations of O’Connor’s work have not quite captured her essence either, though some attempts have been more successful than others. A telling instance comes in “ The Life You Save ,” a 1957 TV adaptation of her short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” starring Gene Kelly in his first small-screen role. He plays Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed vagrant who talks a woman into taking him on as her handyman, then marries her mute, deaf daughter, Lucynell. Tom and Lucynell drive off toward their honeymoon and then, at a diner, as Lucynell naps on the counter, Tom makes his getaway. In the story, Tom picks up a hitchhiker, who insults him before leaping out of the car, and Tom just keeps driving away. In the TV version, however — presumably to avoid offending viewers’ delicate sensibilities — Tom has a change of heart, returning to the diner to retrieve Lucynell after all.

That kind of moment would never have made it into an O’Connor story. She saw the episode, and “the best I can say for it is that conceivably it could have been worse,” she said. “Just conceivably.” (It paid for a new refrigerator for her and Regina.) She was not interested in writing tales of cheap redemption, or those that dramatize a change of heart that brings about a pasted-on happy ending, even if they’d have sold a lot better. Her stories are full of darker things, the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” as she put it. A traveling Bible salesman steals a dour intellectual woman’s false leg. A young man berates his mother for her backward views on race until she has a stroke. A family on the way to a vacation is murdered by a roving serial killer. A pious woman beats the hell out of her reprobate husband after he gets a giant tattoo of Jesus on his back.

“ Wise Blood ,” John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of O’Connor’s 1952 novel of the same name, comes much closer to her uncomfortable tales of uncomfortable grace. The book was adapted by Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, sons of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, close friends of O’Connor (she lived with them for a while, and they edited “Mystery and Manners,” her 1969 collection of lectures and essays). “Wise Blood” is the story of a somewhat unhinged veteran named Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), the grandson of a traveling preacher, who returns to his Tennessee home and tries to spread an antireligious gospel, only to discover he can’t quite get away from God. The Fitzgeralds chose Huston to direct in part because he, like Motes, was an avowed atheist, and they thought that’s what O’Connor would have wanted: a director who wasn’t afraid to skewer the pieties of her native South. But on the last day of shooting, Huston turned to Benedict Fitzgerald and said, “I’ve been had.” He realized he hadn’t managed to tell an atheist’s story at all. He’d told O’Connor’s story, and that meant it was soaked in hideous divine grace.

What none of these capture is the author herself, which is the task that Ethan Hawke’s new film, “ Wildcat, ” takes on. The result is not entirely satisfactory, at least as a stand-alone film; to borrow the form of a cinephile joke, “Wildcat” is for O’Connor fans, not biopic critics. That’s not to say it’s destined for the dustbin — this critic, anyhow, liked it very much. But if you’re not steeped in O’Connor’s life and work already, “Wildcat” is not all that accessible.

But to my eye, “Wildcat” gets O’Connor just about right. She’s hardly an obscure author, but her peculiar combination of fervent faith, unsentimental satire and flair for the bizarre have made her a patron saint to many writers who explore the fault lines between religion and belief, transgression and salvation. Hawke’s film gets this in spades, spotlighting text drawn from her prayer journals (published in 2013) and quips that are, among her devotees, famous and repeatable. For instance, during a dinner at the writer Mary McCarthy’s house, O’Connor memorably declared that if the Eucharist was “just a symbol, to hell with it.” (The movie places this at a different dinner party, in a different city, but the gist is the same.)

The O’Connor of “Wildcat” — played by Maya Hawke, Ethan Hawke’s daughter, who became obsessed with O’Connor while looking for Juilliard audition material — is prickly, funny, and also afraid of the cosmic tug of war between being a great writer and loving God sufficiently. It’s all exacerbated by her physical pain from lupus, the disease that killed her father, and her emotional pain at being back in Georgia, back with her mother, back among people whom she views as having replaced true Christian faith with propriety, niceness and the mandate to uphold social norms. (O’Connor’s views on race are complex and unsatisfactory; from her stories you’d think she was progressive, but her own letters tell another story .)

The way “Wildcat” tackles this is vaguely reminiscent of “Short Cuts,” Robert Altman’s 1993 film that placed various Raymond Carver stories in the same universe, with characters crossing over from one story to the next. In “Wildcat,” Hawke and Laura Linney, who plays Regina in the movie’s main narrative, reappear in dramatizations of several of O’Connor’s best-known short stories, which crop up like dreams in her subconscious. The movie posits that each story wasn’t so much a plot drawn from O’Connor’s life as a sliver of light, dancing on a wall, a refraction of whatever vexed or amused or disgusted her in the world. They are sometimes caricatures — as O’Connor wrote, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” But they’re also her active mind’s way of processing, and reproducing, what she senses about the world. No wonder they were disconcerting to her readers.

When I finished college and, for the first time, was able to freely choose my own reading material quite apart from the demands of school, I picked up the thick volume of O’Connor’s complete stories, edited and published by Giroux. (I would heartily recommend it, but not perhaps to a burned-out recent graduate looking for a break.) In the years since I’ve often found myself sitting under the wisdom of O’Connor, and in particular her ideas about the function of storytelling in our age. Somehow her ideas in “Mystery and Manners” feel even more urgent in our time, when fiction is often assigned a moralizing, instructive role, and readers are often obsessed with finding “relatable” characters.

One of her sentiments has stuck with me as a rubric for watching and thinking about movies, which is what I spend most of my professional life doing. She wrote that to understand good fiction requires “the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.” The same idea cropped up over and over in her work: that an artist’s job — particularly for the artist who believes in a world beyond what’s seen — was to filter truth through the wild confusion of life, to tell things as she saw them but give the enigma of being a human a wide berth.

“Wildcat” grabs all of that and molds it into a slice of O’Connor’s life. Its central scene isn’t from her writing at all. It’s when she’s bedridden with lupus and asks for a visit from a priest (played by Liam Neeson). The priest at first offers her pleasantries and aphorisms about dealing with suffering, but after listening to her agony, his affect changes. He, as she does, understands the pain of trying to see his way through the fog of life.

She begs for reassurance that it’s good to pursue her writing and that God also cares for her. “Is your writing honest?” the priest asks her. “Is your conscience clear?” When she nods, he continues. “Then the rest,” he says, “is God’s business.” It seems to be just what she needs to hear. There’s no easy way to deal with O’Connor’s work and life, its messiness and weirdness and discomfort, and even a movie like “Wildcat,” with its grasp of its subject, can only go so far. But O’Connor, at least, knew exactly what she was doing.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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