What rubrics are: Guides for evaluating student work that establish a shared language among faculty and students for describing how well that work addresses a given learning outcome.
Rubrics typically include multiple specific dimensions, where these dimensions represent different aspects of a given outcome. For example, consider an outcome that reads "students will write research papers that effectively make a scholarly argument." One dimension of this outcome could address the quality of a paper's thesis and another could address organizational structure.
How they work: For each dimension on a rubric, there are multiple levels of performance, defined by criteria that represent a community's consensus on what each level looks like in practice. Essentially, a rubric takes professional and community judgments about qualities of student work and aligns them with a rating scale.
When to use them: Rubrics can be developed for virtually any type of student work (e.g., papers, presentations, participation in discussions, creative projects, etc.). They are especially good for evaluating higher-order skills or forms of knowledge that are not easily measured by tests (e.g., quality of support for written arguments, quantitative reasoning in real-world scenarios, creative choices given an artist's thematic interests).
Example: A rubric for written communication might include the following dimensions (among others):
| Dimension | Accomplished (4) | Proficient (3) | Developing (2) |
Novice (1) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thesis/Central Idea | Thesis/central idea is clearly communicated, worth developing, and engaging. | Presents a thesis/central idea that can be developed. | States thesis/central idea that is weak, or too broad to be developed. |
Attempted thesis/central idea is unclear. |
| Support and Development | Supports ideas with relevant content in a way that shapes the whole work and makes it compelling. | Supports ideas with relevant content in a way that is coherent, but falls short of compelling. | Demonstrates use of supportive content but assumes that supportive content speaks for itself. | Often uses ineffective or inappropriate content (e.g., opinions or clichés) to support points, or offers little evidence of any kind. |
| Next: Creating a rubric | Return to Rubrics home page |