Educator's Voice

Vol 9, Issue 3
May 15, 2008

The benefits and uses of rubrics

An eCollege senior academic trainer outlines the benefits and uses of rubrics

Rubrics have been in use for quite some time now in the K-12 education schools, but this best practice tool has been a bit slow to catch on in higher education. A wider acceptance of the tenets of authentic assessment as encouraged by educators and innovators, such as Grant Wiggins and Jonathan Mueller, has brought with it recognition that rubrics are a great way to facilitate valid measurement of learning, whether you are in the formative or summative stages of a learning task.

Developing and applying rubrics outside of academics is a great way to get a sense for the pervasive usefulness of rubric-based assessment. Here is a rubric I created for my 11-year old son, who is interested in earning money but not, as of yet, particularly informed about what a commitment starting a career in lawn-and-garden care will entail. For my part, I’m interested both in maintaining a nice yard and in teaching Reino the authentic life lesson that he earns more money when he does the best job possible.

Reino: yard work rubric

Mowing:

Weedwacker:

Watering:

Extras: watering flowerbeds or shrubs/tree when Mom thinks it’s time:

 Why don’t I just tell my son Reino that I want him to perform a list of tasks and then let him find out, through a series of trial and error attempts, what I consider a top-notch job? While this form of hands-on, experiential learning is appropriate in some situations, I don’t do this because I want my lawn and plants to survive Reino’s care. I also want my son to be successful and motivated to continue to work hard, earning the most money possible. Of course there are by products for me—a healthy lawn, beautiful plants and the lowest possible water bill.

As you may know through your own children, what you say and what the child hears are sometimes two different things. In my own childhood, the words “clean the kitchen” boiled down to the differing interpretations of “clean” that existed between a teenager and her mother. Today, I’m still not sure if my kitchen meets my mother’s standards because, back then, I perceived these standards as a moving target that, after a few unsuccessful attempts, I couldn’t hope to understand and achieve. In the end, I gave up trying. So, for my family, rubrics are a great way to organize efforts around a quantifiable result—it represents an “explicit scheme” (Allen, 2003, italics mine) that we mutually understand and upon which we agree.

To get started with rubrics, and for a very concise discussion of their uses, a good article to visit is Mary Allen’s Using Scoring Rubrics.  In this article, Allen defines rubrics as “explicit schemes for classifying products or behaviors into categories that vary along a continuum.” But what does the word “explicit” mean in this definition? When one employs rubrics throughout the life-cycle of an assignment or a learning event, “explicit” means that the students and the instructor are in synch regarding expectations around academic or performance achievement.

An illustration of the value of “explicit” in an academic setting came to me recently as I was sitting in a meeting between parents and the administration of my son’s middle school. The school system is moving from letter grades to proficiency based goals. The goals will be stated at the beginning of the school year and then tracked on an ongoing basis (trimesters). The end result will be an assessment of the student’s abilities around these goals at the end of the year (Advanced, Proficient, Partially Proficient and so on).

During this meeting, change-averse parents were firing questions at the principal. The most surprising was simply “What is wrong with the old system?” The principal’s answer really hit home with me—“The old system allows teachers, knowingly or not, to compare one student’s academic achievement to that of others.” (This is known as normative comparison.)

Moreover, the lack of clear, granular and well defined expectations around actual learning versus classroom behavior allows teachers to grant higher grades to academically lower-performing students based on the fact that they are polite and easy to deal with. The end result is that students leave the school year with unrecognized needs for academic intervention. The child’s parents have no idea that this nice kid is unprepared to meet the demands of high school and beyond, because the student’s grades don’t reflect true learning in the way they would if these grades were criterion referenced, divorcing behavior (which can be rewarded in other ways) from academic ability.

Rubrics benefit students

So what benefits do rubrics bring to the learning environment? For students, rubrics are first and foremost a definition of faculty expectations. Do you remember walking into exams feeling like the instructor held the keys to the kingdom, but you didn’t even have a map? Rubrics will level that playing field so that students can concentrate on studying and learning, rather than on figuring out what it is you might want from them.

A case in point—in my undergrad years I had a lower-division, lecture-style history course, and I really enjoyed the professor’s presentation and perspectives. I worked hard in that class and yes, I did learn. However, I consistently received A minus grades on assessments and assignments. I couldn’t figure out why. So, after a couple of quizzes, a midterm and a paper, I went to her office. Was the content somehow not there? Had I left something out? No, none of those things. The professor said the problem was that I wrote “like an English major.” Not shocking, since I was an English major. No one had told me that the difference between an A and an A minus would lie in my writing style. The professor straightened me out on how a historian should begin and conclude each paragraph, and I received straight As from then on. If I would have known about that criterion in the first place, say through a formative feedback structure such as a rubric, then I would remember this professor today in a much better light because the whole thing was really frustrating.

Another way using rubrics will benefit student learning is through the process of self-assessment. A rubric provides a way for students to ask themselves if they have met the criteria put forth in the rubric. This sharpens their critical thinking and analytic skills. The skill of self-assessment will help the students to navigate the evaluation process in the workplace, which is, in a well-structured and managed environment, a process whereby the employee can rely on a set of expectations defined in a job description or a client’s needs assessment in order to determine if a task is complete and well done. Ask your students to fill out the rubric themselves and to substantiate their judgments with examples from their work.

To take this a step farther, involve the students in the formation of the rubric itself. Student involvement will make the underpinnings of the assessment clear to the students with regard to learning objectives and outcomes, as these may not be concepts the student knows are important. This is a great way to demystify the process of assessment and to gain student buy-in, particularly for large, ongoing assignments or for assignments that involve working with a group.

Rubrics benefit you

Rubrics enhance your communication with the students while improving efficiency in grading. Having your expectations “out there” saves time and frustration! You won’t have to repeat yourself over and over when grading every time someone falls short.

Use a set of rubrics to guide the student throughout the life cycle of complex assignments. Even if they are only informational (in that the student uses them for self-assessment at each stage of the assignment but not used for a grade), they will still help the students to organize their efforts and to make critical assessments of their own progress. Students will have an easier time recognizing gaps in their learning and can then come to you with questions they might not otherwise have had. In this way, rubrics serve as both formative and summative evaluation tools.

Additionally, rubrics help to document your interaction with a student around the requirements of an assignment. You can show that the student had foreknowledge of expectations, that these expectations were available to the student for the duration of the assignment, and that you used the rubric to assign a value to the assignment.

Tips for creating rubrics:

1. Mary Allen’s article Using Scoring Rubrics contains a good checklist to use when creating your own rubrics.
2. Enhance your assessment schema standards by incorporating authentic assessment principles http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/
3. Build on or edit rubrics authored by colleagues! Ask them, or do a search in a repository such as http://www.merlot.org
4. Build on or edit template rubrics provided by a rubrics generation site such as
   • http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/
   • http://rubistar.4teachers.org

Tips for using rubrics*:

1. Hand the rubric out on the day the assignment is given so that students know what you are looking for. This is not giving away the keys to the kingdom! This is describing their project to them just as it would be described in the workplace: you, the client, need X in order to have a product that works for you. The student can then be paid accordingly with a grade.
2. Hand the rubric back when handing back the graded assignment. By doing this, you will need to write less commentary on each paper or test. (In my online classes, I put rudimentary rubrics in each test question that I can easily edit to show why/where points were taken off.)
3. Get student buy-in by developing a rubric with them.
4. Give students practice in understanding the rubric by having them apply to sample submissions.
5. Have students use the rubric to assess other students submissions before they send them to you.
   (*These suggestions are partially based on and implicitly align with similar suggestions in Allen, 2003.)

Let’s start a rubrics library:

The eCollege Academic Training and Consulting department is always on the lookout for good rubrics that we can share with instructors requesting some help getting started with this form of assessment. If you have one that works well for you, run it through Creative Commons so that we know the terms under which we can disseminate it, and send it on to rubricslibrarian at eCollege dot com. We thank you in advance!

—Vicki Harsh, M.A.
Sr. Academic Trainer and Consultant

Works Cited:
Allen, Mary (2003, November 25). Using scoring rubrics. Student Learning Outcomes in the CSU, Retrieved January 15, 2008, from http://www.calstate.edu/acadaff/sloa/links/using_rubrics.shtml

Instructor’s Tip:

Inserting a wiki into your course

Web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogs and social networking sites) are becoming increasingly more popular with students and are a great way to encourage online collaboration.  Wikis, in particular, enable students to contribute to and modify content, which is then searchable by other users looking for shared knowledge.  Why not insert one in your course?  Simply follow the instructions below, and your students will be collaborating in no time.

1. Choose a site you’d like to use.  I chose Wet Paint - http://www.wetpaint.com—a  free wiki Web site which is quick and easy to use.
2. Go to your course and click on the Author tab.
3. Click on the item you wish to edit.
4. Switch to HTML mode for authoring.
5. Delete any HTML code which currently exists and paste the following:

<BR COMMENT="Required Element"><BR COMMENT="Required Element">
<SCRIPT language=JavaScript>

document.location.href="http://www.wetpaint.com";

</SCRIPT>

If this page does not change within a few seconds, please click <A href="http://www.wetpaint.com" target=_self>here</A>

6. Click Save.
7. That’s it!  Your students will see the screen below when they click on the content item. 

Things to keep in mind:

1. Even though eCollege is a private, password protected site, the wiki may be public. You may want to include instructional text for your students, reminding them that anything they post may be viewed by others.
2. Your students may need to join or register for one of these sites. If that’s the case, make sure to direct them to the registration URL, so they are able to create an account. 
3. The external Web site you’ve directed your students to may go down, even if eCollege is up and running. If this happens, your student would see a “Page Not Found” error when they click on that content item. The student would be able to see other content items in the course without issue. 
4. Adding the HTML code above works with any Web site.  Simply replace the Wet Paint URL with another. 

--Stephanie Pfeifer, MA
Academic Trainer and Consultant

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