In my quest to develop my own rubric for assessing the blogs that my students would complete in class, I reviewed several other education blogs referencing assessment of student blogs. I also considered what I would like for my students to achieve from blogging, the nature of the blogging in my classroom and my own leanings in terms of grading and rubrics. To that end, the above rubric was my final product.
One major theme that I noticed in researching the student assessment was that of the decision about whether to assess the student blog on an ongoing basis in which much of the grade is based on a required number of posts over a given period of time. Mark Sample included a requirement for students to produce a 500-word entry weekly. While that requirement is appropriate for high school or college students, it may be a little too much for the middle school students that I work with in my classroom.
To that end, my rubric was designed with the end result in mind of being able to fully and exhaustively assess a smaller number of posts individually over the course of the quarter or semester. In addition to the full rubric, I also created what I call a spot-check rubric to assess the in-between posts so that students don’t have the opportunity to turn in work that is much less than their best on those posts, but I don’t have to spend an undue amount of time on content. That rubric relies on numbers as opposed to form and content in expecting students to simply provide a post that answers the given question and provides three pieces of relevant evidence. The minutiae that are examined in the larger rubric are not included. Similarly to Richardson (2010), I share the opinion that grading every blog post for form and content may be too unwieldy in a day and age in which a teacher may see 120 or more students in a given day, closely grading that many blog posts on a weekly basis can be overwhelming for a teacher. The pressure for creating a graded blog post every week can also be weighty for students, so while I may require students to write a post each week, I will probably only grade selected posts.
That requirement will fit in nicely with my personal philosophy on teaching writing which is that the best way to get better at writing is to write a lot, and then read a lot, and then write a lot more. A weekly blog would allow students to have plenty of writing practice and the requirement to synthesize and analyze other sites and blogs will require them to read as well, and it will require them to begin thinking about what they have read and how it fits with their own writing.
References
Richardson, W. (2010) “Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms.” Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Sample, R. (2010, September 27). A rubric for evaluating student blogs. Retreived from: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196.
One major theme that I noticed in researching the student assessment was that of the decision about whether to assess the student blog on an ongoing basis in which much of the grade is based on a required number of posts over a given period of time. Mark Sample included a requirement for students to produce a 500-word entry weekly. While that requirement is appropriate for high school or college students, it may be a little too much for the middle school students that I work with in my classroom.
To that end, my rubric was designed with the end result in mind of being able to fully and exhaustively assess a smaller number of posts individually over the course of the quarter or semester. In addition to the full rubric, I also created what I call a spot-check rubric to assess the in-between posts so that students don’t have the opportunity to turn in work that is much less than their best on those posts, but I don’t have to spend an undue amount of time on content. That rubric relies on numbers as opposed to form and content in expecting students to simply provide a post that answers the given question and provides three pieces of relevant evidence. The minutiae that are examined in the larger rubric are not included. Similarly to Richardson (2010), I share the opinion that grading every blog post for form and content may be too unwieldy in a day and age in which a teacher may see 120 or more students in a given day, closely grading that many blog posts on a weekly basis can be overwhelming for a teacher. The pressure for creating a graded blog post every week can also be weighty for students, so while I may require students to write a post each week, I will probably only grade selected posts.
That requirement will fit in nicely with my personal philosophy on teaching writing which is that the best way to get better at writing is to write a lot, and then read a lot, and then write a lot more. A weekly blog would allow students to have plenty of writing practice and the requirement to synthesize and analyze other sites and blogs will require them to read as well, and it will require them to begin thinking about what they have read and how it fits with their own writing.
References
Richardson, W. (2010) “Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms.” Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Sample, R. (2010, September 27). A rubric for evaluating student blogs. Retreived from: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196.