Rubrics help instructors:
- Assess assignments consistently from student-to-student.
- Save time in grading, both short-term and long-term.
- Give timely, effective feedback and promote student learning in a sustainable way.
- Clarify expectations and components of an assignment for both students and course TAs.
- Refine teaching skills by evaluating rubric results.
Rubrics help students:
- Understand expectations and components of an assignment.
- Become more aware of their learning process and progress.
- Improve work through timely and detailed feedback.
How can you develop a rubric?
- Start small by creating one rubric for one assignment in a semester.
- Ask colleagues if they have developed rubrics for similar assignments.
- Although it takes time to build a rubric, time will be saved in the long run as grading and providing feedback on student work will become more streamlined.
Rubric Development Guidelines
- Examine an assignment for your course.
- Outline the elements or critical attributes to be evaluated (these attributes must be objectively measurable).
- Create an evaluative range for performance quality under each element; for instance, “excellent,” “good,” “unsatisfactory.”
- You can reinforce a developmental approach by students by using a developmental scale in your rubric, like “Beginning”, “Emerging” and “Exemplary.”
- Add descriptors that qualify each level of performance:
- Avoid using subjective or vague criteria such as “interesting” or “creative”; instead, outline objective indicators that would fall under these categories.
- The criteria must clearly differentiate one performance level from another.
- Assign a numerical scale to each level.
- Give a draft of the rubric to your colleagues and/or TAs for feedback.
- Train students to use your rubric and solicit feedback; this will help you judge whether the rubric is clear to them and will identify any weaknesses.
- Rework the rubric based on the feedback.
When developing rubrics consider the following:
- A rubric can be a fillable pdf that can easily be e-mailed to students.
- How much class time is required for teaching and re-teaching the rubric.
How can you incorporate rubrics in a course?
- Rubrics are most often used to grade written assignments, but they have many other uses.
- They can be used for oral presentations.
- They are a great tool to evaluate teamwork and individual contribution to group tasks.
- Rubrics facilitate peer-review by setting evaluation standards.
- Students can use them for self-assessment to improve personal performance and learning.
- For larger assignments, have students use the rubric to provide peer assessment on various drafts.
- Encourage students to use the rubrics to assess their own work.
- Motivate students to improve their work by using rubric feedback to resubmit their work incorporating the feedback.
Here is a sample strategy for introducing rubrics to students:
- Provide samples, or smaller sections of samples, of a complete assignment (consider asking previous students for permission to use their assignments as samples, provided that you remove their names).
- Have students evaluate the assignments individually using the rubric.
- Have students share their results with a partner and justify their evaluation by explaining how they used the rubric.
- Ask a few pairs to share their responses with the class. (Paying attention to students’ reactions/interpretations of the rubric is useful and may inform rubric adjustments).
- Provide your own evaluation of the sample assignments and explain how you used the rubric to assess the work.