Using
Rubrics to Evaluate Student Writing
What
is a rubric?
A rubric is a set of
scoring guidelines for evaluating students' work. A rubric indicates
the criteria you use to judge student performance, and distinguishes
different levels of quality in student work.
Why
bother with rubrics?
There are three good
reasons to use rubrics.
- Good rubrics clearly
identify the instructor's expectations and how to meet those expectations.
They help define the quality of work expected of students.
- They help students
become more thoughtful judges of the quality of their own and
others' work. When used to guide self and peer assessment,
the rubric can help to identify strengths and weaknesses in students'
own and one another's work.
- Rubrics can reduce
the amount of time instructors spend evaluating student work.
Instructors can use the language and categories of the rubric
to give students feedback on the quality of their work. This can
reduce the amount of time trying to explain the flaws and strengths
in the work. Moreover, if students use rubrics to self-correct
or peer-correct their work, instructors will receive more highly
developed work.
How
to create a rubric
It takes time to develop
a good rubric, but that's time saved later on in the grading process.
Here are a few pointers to get started.
- Pick an assignment
that you use regularly so you can refine and use the rubric
again in the future.
- Identify models
of good and poor performance on the assignment. Pick a few
of the best and worst pieces of student work.
- Make a list of
the characteristics or traits shared by the good pieces and
a list of characteristics shared by the poor pieces. The goal
is to develop a list of the criteria that distinguishes good and
poor work: a list of the dimensions that define quality in the
work.
- Define gradations
of quality. The characteristics of the best and worst work
provide anchor points. Fill in the middle levels of quality. You
can make as many gradations or levels as you want. The trick is
to identify clearly what distinguishes the "Best" work
from the "Next Best" work and then the work that is
next best an so on.
- Practice using
the rubric and revise as needed. First, you want to make sure
that it does a satisfactory job of distinguishing levels of performance.
Does it include all the essential dimensions that define quality?
You can tell it is working well if you can read a set of student
work and say with confidence that all the work in the top category
really belongs there—that all the pieces have the same level
of quality on the critical dimensions. If not, something is wrong.
What if you apply the rubric and then discover that work in the
same category actually looks different on the critical dimensions?
You may not be clear yourself about what the actual dimensions
are (e.g., you could be using some criteria that you have not
yet made explicit) or you may be applying the criteria inconsistently
(e.g., you may need to define the criteria more carefully so that
you can use them without thinking twice about what they mean).
For
additional information about how to design and use rubrics see:
Walvoord, Barbara E.
& Anderson, Virginia J. (1998). Effective grading: A tool
for learning and assessment. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Inc.,
Publishers.
An outstanding resource
full of examples and practical advice about how to design more
effective ways to evaluate and grade student work.
Wiggins, Grant (1998).
Educative assessment: Designing assessments to inform and improve
student performance. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers.
The definitive work
on how to design rubrics-but accessible to a general audience.
©2001,
Bill Cerbin and Terry Beck
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