Chocolate Chip Cookies & Single Point Rubrics

Today: an analogy for explaining our single point rubrics, after explaining their set up to a parent during parent/teacher conferences today.

Our health education department uses single point rubrics for all of our summative assessments. A single point rubric is set up differently than your traditional, column and row analytic rubric. To make a long story short: three columns, left to right: the middle column has the criteria for a student to demonstrate proficiency and the left and right columns allow a blank space for teachers to explain how students are either not meeting or exceeding that criteria. We use the single point rubric because it brings the focus to feedback, and in our experience allows for more critical thinking and creativity from our students. It also opens up the door to differentiation for each assessment.

The analogy I use to explain this to my students (and their parents) involves baking chocolate chip cookies. If I buy a bag of chocolate chips, I’ll see a recipe on the back to make chocolate chip cookies. If I follow that recipe, will I produce a chocolate chip cookie? Yes. Will it get the job done for someone who is craving a chocolate chip cookie? Sure. But if I want to be the best cookie baker I can be, then I need to think about how I can add to that recipe to make it that much better. Maybe I add in more chocolate chips. Maybe I add in mint extract to make mint chocolate chip cookies, or I modify the recipe based on the food allergies of whomever will be eating them. Maybe I add a box of vanilla pudding mix into the cookie batter, as Lianna H. (DHS alumna!!) used to do with her cookies she made for after cross-country meets. And after I do that, I taste the finished product and go “WOW! What a cookie!” 

So I’ll ask my students, “For this project, what is going to be your ‘vanilla pudding mix’ ?” Not all of them accept that challenge; many are content with just doing what the recipe says to do. Education has gone down the road of recipes and checklists, and I want my students to think beyond just following directions when they complete their projects. Using single point rubrics help us accomplish that goal, and helps us avoid getting 100 projects turned in that are all the same, while allowing us as educators to look for what end up being essentially endless possibilities around different areas of concern or excellence from each student. I could go on and on with this analogy, but I’ll stop here for now.

Ideally, all of our students end up in the “proficient” category for their summative assessments. Is that good enough? Sure. But as I mentioned earlier, in today’s world, we want people who don’t just follow the recipe all the time.

For more on single point rubrics, check out these articles from the Cult of Pedagogy on the single point rubric and other rubrics. 

Now, about that grading…

Categories: Classroom

Jeff Bartlett