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To humanize feedback, two teacher educators collaborated with students in their classes and inservice teachers to develop a set of questions to consider when designing writing rubrics.
During a recent study we conducted about student perceptions of academic language, Christina taught English to eleventh graders, and when she asked a student why he did not want to edit his draft, he said, "I'll still just be 'Below Basic,' no matter what." "Below Basic" was the lowest score a piece of writing could receive on the writing rubric used in all of the student's classes. Christina has carried that moment with her, concerned that the student thought of the writing rubric label as a referendum on his potential as a writer. Young writers encounter this implicit and explicit messaging in rubrics throughout their schooling career, including high-stakes assessments such as statewide exams and standardized assessments related to college access. The ACT Writing Test Rubric for argumentative writing-that uses terms such as "weakly responds," "fails," "unclear," and "irrelevant,"-for example, offers a sample of what language rubrics may unintentionally communicate about language deficits (see Figure 1). It is easy to imagine how a phrase like "little or no skill in writing an argumentative essay" could be discouraging to writers. This language would be especially discouraging, though, if used regularly in the classroom to describe students' writing performance.
Furthermore, writing feedback practices sometimes position students' work as either sufficient or insufficient using phrases such as "little or no control," which may also detract from students' writing self-efficacy. Though we cannot change writing rubrics in high-stakes assessments, as teachers we can reflect and take action in our use of writing rubrics in our classrooms. It is our aim in putting forth this framework to connect writing assessment to a culturally sustaining pedagogical stance and confront school policies and classroom practices that support a monocultural and monolingual society (Paris 93).
Students' struggles with writing have been welldocumented, especially because oral discourse can be in high contrast with written school discourses (Bruning and Horn 27), and the number of strugglers is particularly high for language users who learn English at school or use dialectal variants of English that are unfairly perceived to be non-standard (NCES 29). Django Paris and H. Samy...