The standards and rubrics are meant to support teachers in the promotion of genuine and rigorous work, as well as guide professional development and collaboration.
Schoolwork is regarded largely as a series of contrived exercises necessary to earn credentials (grades, promotions) required for future success, but for many, especially poor students of color, this work leads to disengagement and dropping out.
[4] Finally, value beyond school acknowledges the necessity for students to present their knowledge in a variety of complex forms of communication to resemble real life work.
To meet this criterion students use verbal, symbolic, graphic, and visual tools to explain, narrate, justify, and converse about a topic.
[5] Their research was performed in response to their belief in a lack of rigor and relevance in educational reforms that encouraged the teaching of basic skills and ability to recall knowledge.
In sum, assignments that demand more authentic intellectual work elicit intensive thinking about and a deeper engagement in varied applications of words, concepts, and ideas.
This occurs when students combine facts and ideas in order to synthesize, generalize, explain, hypothesize, or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation.
[9] Students engage in extended conversational exchanges with the teacher and/or their peers about subject matter in a way that builds an improved and shared understanding of ideas or topics.
Student performance demonstrates thinking about disciplinary content through organizing, synthesizing, interpreting, hypothesizing, describing patterns, making models or simulations, constructing arguments, or considering alternative points of view.
[17] Student performance demonstrates an elaborated, coherent account that draws conclusions or makes generalizations or arguments and supports them with examples, summaries, illustrations, details, or reasons.
Additionally, administrators mentioned AIW doesn't have a substantial amount of research behind it that supports its positive effects on students learning, which makes it more challenging to convince schools boards to fund its implementation.
Finally, administrators also commented on the challenge they face keeping teachers motivated to continue having worthwhile dialogue centered around the rubrics once they become accustomed to the framework and the feedback sessions become routine.