Customising the Scribo Process - Rubric Management and Class/Community Sharing

Each student a unique individual!

Our students are unique individuals and so are our teaching methods and class/school/state standards! According to the requirements of each assignment, Scribo makes it easy for teachers to upload curriculum/school/grade level rubrics so marking across classes, levels and schools remain consistent and objective to better prepare our students for summative assessments and state examinations.

In this series, we look into customising the journey for each individual school or class and setting consistent standards by pooling resources together in our school communities. By working collaboratively, we can calibrate the AI to mimic human teacher behaviour more accurately and provide objectivity in the marking that we do.

The focus for this series includes:

1. Choosing from pre-existing rubrics available on Scribo

2. Uploading school/state rubrics or creating from scratch

3. Sharing/Accessing resources within the school community

4. Assigning writing activities to more than one class

5. Setting up writing activities for students across all subjects

1. Choosing from pre-existing rubrics available on Scribo

In a discussion paper published by The University of Melbourne titled, "Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Teachers' Qualitative Judgments (Sadler, 1986)", the author writes that in an effort to improve the judgements made by teachers-as-qualitative-judges, there are two conditions that must be fulfilled:

1. Set up mechanisms where the collective teacher group can reach a consensus on which qualities are assessed and how their corresponding degrees of proficiency are displayed

2. Make these standards accessible to non-professionals (i.e. parents and students themselves), hence removing a teacher's private knowledge structures of these standards

Addressing these two conditions, Scribo has made the rubrics of various English proficiency tests readily available for teachers to use.

2. Importing school/state rubrics or creating from scratch

Besides the rubrics available, Scribo provides opportunities for teachers to customise the process by uploading rubrics of their choice. This is to ensure that standards are kept consistent and objective throughout the year and for any grade level in the school.

With the following steps, teachers can upload school or state rubrics with specific descriptors and make changes or create their own rubrics from scratch. The AI will be calibrated accordingly to give accurate grades and feedback to the students even before the teacher has read a word from the essay.

3. Sharing/Accessing resources within the school community

In a thriving school community where teachers actively collaborate and share resources, students are presented with instructions and learning experiences that enriching and consistently well put together. This not only saves teachers' time preparing those resources year in and year out, it helps new beginning teachers onboard swiftly into the school system and gain implicit professional development knowledge along the way.

You can almost hear a new beginning teacher say:

• "Wow, I didn't know writing classes could be conducted in this manner! No wonder the students are kept engaged!"

• "Oh, so that's how you provide scaffolding when teaching writing to Grade 7 students! I'm learning something new each day!"

• "I see that the Grade 9 teacher did this with her class this year. Let me try that too! I can modify the activity, if I need to, to suit my current students' needs and then share that across with other teachers."

4. Assigning writing activities to more than one class

Similar to the idea of sharing resources within the school community, for a teacher teaching a few English writing classes in that academic year, he/she can easily assign writing classes to more than one class, regardless of level.

Even with the exact same writing activity, Scribo views each student according to their grade levels and gives feedback that is suitable and digestible for that age group - talk about AI-assisted differentiated learning and instruction!

5. Setting up writing activities for students across all subjects

Research after research has shown that in order to write better, you need to write more. As time-poor teachers, how can we encourage writing when more student writing means more teacher marking?

At Scribo, not only do we make writing activities easy to create, scaffold, assign, mark and give feedback, we encourage writing as a learning strategy and adopt what Youki, in her Edutopia article 'Why students should write in all subjects', calls "low-stakes writing" to help students "recall information, make connections between different concepts, and synthesise information in new ways (Tereda, 2021)."

Teachers can set up writing activities across all subjects i.e. history, geography, science, math, social studies, and create the space students need to process their thoughts and come up with creative ideas to remember important concepts.

For students who can and would like to write more than prescribed, teachers can also set up writing activities specifically for them!

Teach it the way you like with Scribo - any time, any place, any subject, for one student, for some students and for all students, all at once!

References:

• Royce, S. D. (1986, January 1). Discussion paper 5. subjectivity, objectivity, and teachers’ qualitative judgments. Digitised Collections. https://digitised-collections.unimelb.edu.au/items/3e155f10-5bdc-5362-b742-b8fd0725ecaf

• McTighe, J., & Frontier, T. (2022, April 1). How to provide better feedback through rubrics. ASCD. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/how-to-provide-better-feedback-through-rubrics

• Terada, Y. (2021, January 7). Why students should write in all subjects. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-students-should-write-all-subjects/