Developing Genre-Based Rubrics for Assessing Students’ Writings

A rubric refers to features that describe the expectation of how the examinees proceed with the test. It also concerns information about how any assignment should be done, and is a list of the specific standards to which students will be held accountable. A genre-based rubric is the kind of rubric needed by teachers to assess students’ writing since students’ writing, especially in high schools, is based on the types of genre required by the curriculum. This paper discusses ways to develop an appropriate rubric for assessing students’ writing. Several considerations include: choosing between holistic, analytic, single-trait, or multi-trait scoring models; determining criteria for assessing content; determining criteria for assessing generic structure (since each genre has different structures); and deciding the lexicogrammatical features to be assessed in each type of writing.