Rubrics in the Digital Age
As technology advances, so do the ways in which rubrics are created and used. Traditionally, creation of rubrics involved research, contemplation, trial and error, and a lot of time for these as well as other factors such as formatting. In today's digital modernity, however, all of these factors have been expedited.
Irubric is a website that boasts an advanced rubric creation tool. The site encourages users to share and assess completed rubrics, and currently boasts over 400,000 published rubrics; the majority of which are dedicated to writing. Membership is open to instructors and students and is free. Users of the site constitute an active community, with topics ranging from diction included in rubrics to their incorporation in a classroom. The gradation scale of the Easy Assessment app
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Irubric does not stop at the creation process, however. It and other tools such as the Easy Assessment app are changing the way that instructors assess papers as well. Irubric allows access of those rubrics in an interactive process that results in grading with a few presses of the finger:
Click above to enter iRubric
The implications of this technology, according to the creators, is less time grading and more time instructing. Indeed, the convenience is difficult to deny, however, the sharing of rubrics among students may lead to a misunderstanding of what is expected of them for their particular class and grading papers with a few taps on a wireless device seems as detached as one can be from the process. Where is the room for feedback?
But the evolution of assessment does not cease with a few clicks of the finger, rubrics are also being incorporated into automated assessment: grading by computers. This technique is a step in the direction of reliability, but a perceivable step away from feedback and attention to creative writing styles. Deane and others go into detail about the practices involved in and implications of automated scoring in their research article: Automated Essay Scoring in Innovative Assessments of Writing from Sources Here, Deane et al underscore the importance of incorporating human assessment in some manner (pre-assignment tasks) when using programming to do the dirty work. |