Differences of a Rubric and a Proficiency Scale

Today I worked with my 7th grade Social Studies teacher on creating a proficiency scale for the Industrial Revolution.  I asked him to come to our planning meeting with the standards that will be covered and if he had the learning targets to go with it.  I also shared the proficiency scale template we use at our school with him.  He came in today with a found "proficiency scale" from the internet.

Which is why I feel it is important to explain what I think is the difference between rubrics and proficiency scales.

Rubrics are a scoring guide used to evaluate the quality of students' constructed responses.  According to A Teacher's Guide to Standards-Based Learning,  "defines proficiency scales as a learning progression or set of learning goals for a specific topic, relative to a given standard."


An example of a rubric for industrial revolution is to the right.  In this rubric you can see they use the terms "some" and "few" within the level of the rubric.

When talking to my teacher I asked him, "if I was a student in your class would I know what some and few were in my learning?"  If the answer is no then you have a rubric for an assignment or assessment not a content learning progression.


Proficiency scales help guide students to understanding the content and progression of that content.

Once we determined we need to adjust the rubric so students understand what they will be learning throughout the unit, we worked on creating the proficiency scale to the left.  This scale will guide students to understanding the content not the task.

We started first with the Social Studies standards and broke those down into student friendly learning targets. We cross-referenced the learning targets with the ELA (English Language Arts) standards for the processing skills.  Then we determined what proficiency looked like by breaking the targets down asking the question: what does it look like to be partial proficient.

This proficiency scale will drive instruction and help the students know what is expected of them and the teacher know the progression of learning that will take place with this standard.

The next step will be to create the essential questions and then the assessment.