Tip: Using Rubrics Effectively
Tip: Using Rubrics Effectively
Use a cookie-evaluation activity to teach students how to use a rubric.
It’s that time of the semester - papers, projects, and first exams are rolling in. If you haven’t already, now would be a great time to think about how to make the process of grading more efficient. I shared some resources last semester about reducing grading workload by automating first-round feedback with your LMS, using peer discussion to evaluate work rather than share opinions, and using smaller summative assignments to build student capacity. Rubrics - used well - can also help to make grading more efficient and make the feedback you provide to students more effective.
The prevailing hypothesis about how rubrics help students is that they make explicit both the expectations for student work and, more generally, describe what learning looks like…In this way, rubrics play a role in the formative learning cycle (Where am I going? Where am I now? Where to next?) and support student agency and self-regulation.
From “Appropriate Criteria: Key to Effective Rubrics”
How to make rubrics work
Describe student learning, not assignment expectations. If you’ve asked students to use evidence to support their writing and asked them to use at least 5 sources for their paper, the rubric should describe how you want them to use the sources rather than repeating the assignment expectation of 5 or more sources.
Give the rubric to students before they begin work. While rubrics can be helpful for grading alone, the power of a rubric is more in its use as a formative tool. Rubrics make explicit what you expect learners to do - which is why it’s important to use descriptive language rather than evaluative language.
Build the rubric with students. Many students have experience with rubrics from high school, but it can be helpful to (re-)set expectations around what rubrics are and how they should be used. Sometimes I do this with an activity where we first evaluate a chocolate chip cookie - and, yes, I bring two different brands of cookies into class - according to a cookie rubric.
I like this activity, not just because students love food, but because it really gets at the core of what is effective about a rubric and where the rubric has flaws. When we go through the activity, after they’ve rated the two different cookies, I ask them to think about a couple of questions:
Is your “favorite” cookie the highest-scoring cookie, according to the rubric? Why or why not?
What does the rubric tell you about what I value in cookies?
The goal is to help students understand that - ideally - a rubric is about clear expectations for the quality of their work. It’s not about, “My professor hated my paper.” From the rubric above, it’s clear that I have a strong preference for chewy, not crispy, chocolate chip cookies. If they baked me crispy cookies that performed well in all other areas - lots of chips, not over-baked, rich buttery flavor - I would probably still be happy with the cookie. More importantly, even if the texture really ruined the cookie-eating experience for me, I could still fairly evaluate the cookie on the other components of the rubric. Of course, the texture of the cookie is somewhat tied to color - it would be hard to have the ideal texture in a cookie that was burnt - and that’s also something valuable for students to know about how rubrics work.
If you’d like to see the full cookie rubric presentation, here’s a link that will prompt you to make a copy for yourself.
Getting started with rubrics? Check out the single-point rubric. Rather than outlining 3-5 different levels of performance for each criterion, you only describe one: meets expectations. This type of rubric particularly works well when you anticipate that most students will produce work that “meets expectations” because you are just adding notes about where they need to improve. If most students won’t yet be at “meets expectations” then the single-point rubric might be more work, depending on the level and type of feedback you ordinally give on a task.
For more reading:
Chapter 1 of How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading, “What Are Rubrics and Why Are They Important?” provides a strong overview of rubrics.
For an interesting literature review/analysis of rubrics in higher education, see this article: Appropriate Criteria: Key to Effective Rubrics
Providing feedback via audio recordings is a huge time-saver
Rubrics fit well with specs (specifications) grading
RubiStar helps you generate rubrics, or adapt a rubric in their library