Writing Rubrics

The KIPP Wheatley curriculum includes student and teacher rubrics for each grade for the three main genres of writing identified by the Common Core State Standards: opinion/argumentative, informative, and narrative. Each rubric describes expectations for student writing across five strands: 1) focus on task and text, 2) organization, 3) development and support, 4) knowledge of language, and 5) conventions, which a detailed language checklist describes.

Teacher Rubrics

The teacher rubrics include criteria for four levels of student work. KIPP Wheatley instruction and sample student responses target level three, “Meets Expectations.” Level four, “Exceeds Expectations,” reflects standards and skills at the next grade level. Level one reflects standards and skills at the previous grade level.

Student Rubrics

The student rubrics include student-friendly language for level three of the teacher rubrics. They also give students a three-level ranking system to self-assess their progress toward mastery of each criteria. If you feel a student has moved beyond a grade’s proficiency criteria, provide the student rubric for the next grade level.

How to Internalize the Rubrics

Read the teacher rubric carefully to internalize and understand its intent. The teacher rubrics are necessarily more detailed than the student versions. After reading the teacher rubric, read the corresponding student rubric. The crosswalk rubric shows the teacher and student columns for level three.

How to Use the Rubrics

Use Rubrics to Score On-Demand and Focus Writing Tasks
We recommend scoring writing tasks on each of a rubric’s five strands to identify students’ specific strengths and areas of growth.

Use Rubrics to Give Feedback
The best feedback is specific, timely, nonjudgmental, and actionable. Teachers can use phrases from the rubric to give feedback, starting with the “Focus on Task and Text” strand, connecting specific elements of student writing to a particular rubric score.

Use Rubrics to Target instruction
Rubric criteria can help pinpoint the skills students need to move their work from partially to fully meeting expectations. For example, if a large number of students score a level two “Partially Meets Expectations” in a certain strand, consider using a pause point to show exemplars of that strand in the level three and four range.

Use Rubrics to Score Writing Checkpoint and End-of-Module Assessments
Use the suggested scoring criteria, the rubrics, and the provided student exemplars to score the OER item on the writing checkpoint and the OER item on the end-of-module assessment, which are each tagged with a writing standard (W.1, W.2 or W.3.)

The suggested scoring criteria for writing checkpoint and EOM assessments provides specific criteria for the “focus on task and text” strand of the rubrics. Use these criteria to determine a score for students’ proficiency on this strand of the rubric only. Use the rubrics to determine a score for students’ proficiency for the “organization” and “development and support” strands of the rubrics. Use the “language checklists,” which are in the rubric documents, to determine scores for the “knowledge of language” and “conventions” strands of the rubrics.

Note that the rubrics are on a four-point scale. However, a level four represents above grade-level proficiency and should be reserved for process-based focus writing tasks that students produce over time. The table below shows the difference between using the rubrics to score assessments and using the rubrics to score the process-based focus writing tasks.