Helping Students Look Beyond Grades With Visual Rubrics

Science teacher Eileen Ng has become a believer in the value of using visual rubrics to help students see beyond traditional letter or percentage grades. “ I’ve always thought it’s strange for a student to take a test that covers so many different learning objectives in a unit, and then to receive a single number percentage or a single letter grade that somehow summarizes their understanding of the material,” says Ng, an educator at Lexington Christian Academy in Massachusetts. In her high school science classes, she found that students’ self-esteem was taking a big hit on days she gave tests back. “I wanted the act of getting a test back to be something informative and useful and helpful, and not something that was going to detrimentally affect them emotionally—or shift their focus away from the real point of getting feedback, which is to learn from your mistakes, to acknowledge what you did well, and to move forward.”

And so she set out on a mission: to visually represent their mastery of the material. Through trial and error, she developed a four-column rubric that demonstrates how students perform on each learning objective. ”It can be as granular or as broad as a teacher wishes. But for me, I just needed to keep track of which questions they were getting correct, which questions they were getting incorrect, and also, for the open response questions, where on that four-point scale they were falling.”

Instead of the room being filled with dread, she noticed “a flurry of conversation” on the days she gave tests back. Because there wasn’t just one singular grade, students took time to look over each part of the rubric and actually talk about it with their peers. “ They were very open about their level of knowledge, and they were comparing their performance to how much they prepared. There was none of that numerical comparison, just conversation.” As a result, says Ng, “you get more of an alignment between teacher evaluation and student self-assessment, and that is what you want—for them to understand why they earned the grade that they did.”

An added bonus? Because it was so clear which learning objectives a student needed to work on, students were much more willing to revise or schedule a retake. “Instead of thinking, ‘Oh no, I have to retake this entire test and I have to study again from scratch,’ they felt confident about certain learning objectives, and they took action steps to address the learning objectives they hadn’t mastered yet.”

But Ng didn’t stop there. Spurred on by the positive outcomes, she decided to revamp her lab reports as well. For this, she took inspiration from English language arts teacher John Meehan’s Spider Graph rubric, replacing his language arts–specific skills with scientific inquiry ones. For this rubric, she fills out the left-hand side of the form and then hands it back to students, and they plot the points and connect them. “Carving out that time in class for them to physically connect the dots and look at each skill in turn encourages more self-reflection and metacognition.”

“The beauty of this visual rubric is that you can use the same tool over time,” points out Ng. For example, if you use a different color for each lab, one rubric can demonstrate how they’ve grown in certain skills over time. It can be used both as a hard copy or digitally. ”Personally, I think a hard copy is helpful for students to physically map their progress, but you can do it digitally using drag-and-drop elements.”

Ng is the first to admit that “the process of converting visual rubrics to a percentage grade for your learning management system or your grading portal can be complicated.” But for her, the extra time is worth it. ”For many of my students, B is not satisfactory, but they don’t know how to go from B to A. This journey of developing visual rubrics has led me to this place where I am illuminating the learning pathway for them, so that they can be motivated and feel confident about continuing on… not getting discouraged by one grade, but by seeing that feedback as information.”

Ng has made a blank version of her bar chart rubric and a sample spiderweb lab report rubric available for other educators to modify and use (requires Google sign-in to make an instant editable copy). For more information on Ng’s visual rubrics, see her article for Edutopia, “Representing Student Proficiency and Progress With Visual Rubrics.”

Special thanks to Katelyn Dyer for photographs of Eileen Ng.