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Rubrics - The Answer to "Why Did You Give Me This Grade?" |
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"Rubrics are a critical and vital link between assessment and instruction. They operationalize quality in our minds so we can more effectively teach and lead." - Alan D. Rowe  What is a rubric? - A printed set of scoring guidelines for evaluating a performance or a product and for giving feedback.
- An authentic assessment tool used to measure students' work.
- A way to let a student know:
- How his/her work will be judged.
- The difference between good work and weaker work.
- A working guide for both students and teachers.
What are the advantages of using rubrics? - Focus teacher instruction.
- Improve student performance by making teacher expectations clear and by showing students how to meet those expectations.
- Helps the teacher justify/explain a grade to students and to parents because assessment is more objective and consistent.
- Help students become more thoughtful judges of the quality of their own and others' work.
- Allow teachers to accommodate heterogeneous classes.
- Reduce the amount of time teachers spend evaluating student work.
- Provide students with more informative feedback about their strengths as well as areas in need of improvement.
What are the cirtical components of a rubric? - Focus teacher instruction.
- Improve student performance by making teacher expectations clear and by showing students how to meet those expectations.
- Helps the teacher justify/explain a grade to students and to parents because assessment is more objective and consistent.
- Help students become more thoughtful judges of the quality of their own and others' work.
- Allow teachers to accommodate heterogeneous classes.
- Reduce the amount of time teachers spend evaluating student work.
- Provide students with more informative feedback about their strengths as well as areas in need of improvement.
What should a good rubric do? - Address all relevant content and performance objectives.
- Define standards and help students achieve them by providing criteria with which they can evaluate their own work.
- Be easy to understand and use.
- Be applicable to a variety of tasks.
- Provide all students with an opportunity to succeed at some level.
- Yield consistent results, even when administered by difference scorers.
- Be useful for student feedback (formative assessment).
How do you develop your rubric?
- Look at models. Show students examples of good and not-so-good work.
- Define possible criteria or performance levels that students would possibly demonstrate.
- Levels would range from the possible highestg performance to the lowest performance that can be expected from students on any given task and would provide descriptions of performance for each level.
- Each level should be directly observable.
- Scores can be assigned for each level from highest to lowest or vice versa.
- Once each level is determined with rating scales assigned, share the description with the students and ask for feedback so that each level is clearly understood.
- If possible, provide anonymous examples of student work that illustrate each performance level.
- Using the rubric, explain to students what each performance level means in relation to the rubric and the rating scales used to evaluate the performances.
- Fewer dimensions are better than more in most cases.
Can students create rubrics? Should they?
Where can I find examples of rubrics, especially for those hard-to-find topics?
What if I want to build my own rubric from scratch?
- Just go to one of the Rubric Generators listed below.
- Or build your own by inserting a table into a word processing document.
Where do I find rubric generators?
Sources Consulted
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