Mystery of the Rubric - Solved

What constitutes excellent work in your courses? Have you ever actually tried to describe the characteristics of excellent work—if only for yourself? Do your students know what you consider to be excellent? How well do your students know the standards against which their work will be compared? How would it affect student learning if you told students what you are looking for in their work? Are you confident that you apply the same criteria to all students? work when you grade assignments or is there a possibility that your criteria shift as you work through the papers or projects?

Using a rubric just might be the answer for you. What exactly is a rubric? Webster defines a rubric as "an authoritative rule." When applied to the assessment of student work, a rubric outlines the scoring "rules" for an assignment. A carefully designed rubric, defining precise criteria for success, is helpful to both instructors and students. For students, it provides key criteria that that informs their development, revision, and judgment of their own work. For instructors, it helps reduce grading subjectivity, reduces student grade anxiety, and drives pedagogy.

Rubrics are classified as either analytic or holistic. Analytic rubrics detail performance levels for each stated performance criterion. Using analytic rubrics, instructors are able to assess each part of the whole assignment or product.

Holistic rubrics, on the other hand, do not detail separate levels of performance for each stated performance criterion. Instead, holistic rubrics use multiple criteria as a whole to assess overall performance. In many instances, analytic rubrics can easily be converted into holistic rubrics.

A rubric is typically a one or two page document that should be shared with students at the same time an assignment is made. It should be carefully reviewed with students to ensure a shared understanding about the assignment and the performance standards. A popular format for rubrics is a grid. The rows of the grid list the performance criteria (what counts) for the assignment or project. The columns of the grid contain descriptions of quality or levels of achievement, which usually are assigned a numeric value.

The notion of using rubrics sounds good, but how does one get started creating one for a specific assignment? Good rubrics are the product of a thorough analysis of existing samples of student work. Consider for a moment how you currently grade student assignments. You probably spend time reading and sorting student work into piles of differing quality. How often do you stop and take a look at how the piles differ, and more importantly, why they differ? This analysis is the first step in establishing appropriate descriptors for quality or levels of achievement for the assignment. It will also help you examine and re-examine your target performance objectives (what counts) on the assignment.

While rubric creation can be time consuming, the payoff for both instructors and students is great. Learning increases when learners have a sense of what they are setting out to learn, a statement of explicit standards they must meet, and way of seeing what they have learned (Loaker, Cromwell, & O'Brien, 1986, p. 47).

Reference

Loacker, G., Cromwell, C., & O'Brien, K. (1986). Assessment in Higher Education: To Serve the Learner. In Adelman, C., Assessment in American higher education (pp. 47-62). Washington, DC: US Department of Education.

From 2004 ITC Topics