Rubrics
Rubrics are becoming increasingly popular as a scoring tool to assess student learning. It typically follows a “grid” format, listing the criteria or components of grading student work, and articulating gradations of quality for each criteria.
A well-developed rubric can clarify expectations to students, make grading and assessment more efficient, help grading across multiple faculty members more uniform and focused, and easily accommodate heterogeneous student performance levels.
Example rubric developed by the Department of History to assess student essay in History 110:
| Dimension | (1) Does not meet expectations |
(2) Needs improvement (Developing) |
(3) Meets expectations (Proficient) |
(4) Exceeds expectations (Advanced) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Historical Knowledge |
Fails to provide at least one concrete example of |
Provides at least one concrete example of how an historical phenomenon shaped a global culture |
Provides two or more concrete examples of how historical phenomena shaped two or more cultures |
Provides a sophisticated understanding using two or more concrete examples of the development of two or more cultures beyond the 100-level |
| Global Awareness |
Fails to communicate any sense of global interconnectivity and interdependency across time and/or space |
Has only a vague sense of global |
Has a clear sense of global interconnectivity and interdependency across time and/or space |
Has a sophisticated understanding of |
For a rubric to be effective, it needs to be of high quality. Here are the recommended steps for developing a good rubric:
- Gather a group of faculty: Working with others makes it easier to put together a comprehensive and well-articulated rubric.
- Examine student sample works: Look at student works of differing quality levels (excellent to poor); identify the characteristics that separate the excellent ones from the poor ones.
- List criteria: Discuss the characteristics identified, and agree upon a final list of characteristics that will be graded in the rubric.
- Articulate gradations of quality: Unpack each characteristic. Describe what the best to the worst levels of quality would look like. Discuss the descriptions, and fill in the rubric with the agreed-upon descriptions.
- Pilot the rubric: Take a small sample of student works (with varying quality levels). Apply the rubric to grade the student work. Compare grading results.
- Revise the rubric: Discuss any grading discrepancies; Revise the rubric to make the criteria/descriptions clear, precise, and easy to understand.
- Pilot the updated rubric: Take another small sample of student works (again with varying quality levels). Apply the updated rubric to grade them. Compare grading results.
- Reach inter-rater reliability: Repeat the last two steps until satisfactory inter-rater reliability (i.e. agreement between different raters) is reached. The rubric is now ready to be used individually by the faculty who were involved in the development process. Remember to repeat the process of ensuring inter-rater reliability periodically and when new faculty/graders join the group. Also, make sure the rubrics are made available to the students prior to them completing the performance task - they need to know what is expected of them!
