Unraveling the Effects of Rubrics and Exemplars on Student Writing Performance

Teachers across educational systems struggle to find time to provide quality feedback to their students. Asking students to create their own feedback has been shown to enhance students' performance. In this experimental study, we explored the effects of rubrics and exemplars on writing performance, encouraging students to employ these tools for self-feedback generation. Two hundred six 9th- and 10th-grade students participated. Students were asked to write an essay and revise it based on the information provided to them under four conditions: control, rubrics, exemplars, and combined condition (rubrics and exemplars). After submitting the revised version of their essay, students in experimental conditions were trained on how to use rubrics and/or exemplars. Students were then asked to write another essay and revise it based on the information consistent with their experimental group membership (i.e., control, rubric, exemplars, combined). We found that students in the rubrics condition benefited the most, closely followed by students in the exemplars condition, and then the combined condition. The performance across conditions was somewhat variable for the three performance outcomes. Furthermore, the improvement in the usage of the tools following the training session was the highest for the exemplars condition. We conclude that teachers can encourage students to use both rubrics and exemplars to generate self-feedback and improve performance. This way, teachers' workload can be significantly decreased. Public Significance Statement This study suggests that high school students can effectively use rubrics and exemplars to self-assess, generate self-feedback, and revise their essays based on it. That is, rubrics and exemplars have a potential to both enhance self-feedback that leads to higher performance and to increase teachers' efficient use of time.