Using rubrics for assessing learning or improving instruction

Rubrics have been around for a long time and it’s clear that they have the potential to save time and improve instruction.  A rubric can be used to improve instruction if it is used as a guide to accompany an assignment. This kind of rubric tells students what it is that they should know or be able to do by the time they complete the assignment by providing them with the criteria or most important elements of the activity, plus the levels of quality for each element. This kind of instructional rubric can easily be turned into an assessment rubric by attaching a grade to each of the quality levels. So an instructional rubric can save time because it adds clarity and understanding to the assignment and an assessment rubric can save time because it can be used as a grading guide.

A rubric is generally created in a table format that includes two essential elements:

• A list of criteria that tells students what is important in the activity or assignment. The criteria should be guided by the question, “what should my student know or be able to do by the time they complete this assignment?” The list of essential criteria is usually placed in the right-hand column of the table.
• Specific descriptions of the levels of quality for each element in the criteria list. The quality descriptions for each criteria usually appear in cells of the table next to each criteria, moving left to right from excellent quality to poor quality.

TIP: If you have a set of course learning goals they should influence the creation of a rubric for a course assignment. A goal tells students what they should know or be able to do by the end of the course while a rubric for an assignment looks at a specific part (goal/goals) of the course and includes criteria (should have some relationship to the goals) and descriptions of quality.

Examples of rubrics from UC Berkeley:

Media Studies [word]
Environmental Science [word]
French [word]

Read more about creating rubrics [pdf]