Week 13

This week is our last week of lecture for this semester. We are required to write an essay on rubric and teaching and learning.

Topic: Rubrics  & Teaching & Learning

What is a rubric?

A rubric is a scoring guide that seeks to evaluate a student’s performance based on a range of defined criteria or guidelines, and should be developed to build upon students’ current knowledge and skills. When given to students before they commence a unit of work, students are able to think about the criteria and goals they have to meet and how they can address these. Rubrics serve an important role in creating assessment that is student-centred and standards driven.

Teaching and Learning

A well-designed rubric is an effective communication tool. It emphasizes the important skills or concepts to demonstrate. It provides criteria for evaluation and takes the intangible on an unfamiliar assignment and makes it more tangible. A rubric streamlines the grading process. It helps teachers to efficiently work through a stack of ungraded papers. It quantifies the elusive expectations and makes them clear. There can be no claims from students saying, “You never told us that was needed.” One cannot argue with the on-screen, printed standards. It makes estimates more scientific and grading fairer. There is no room for bias or subjective prejudice in rubric utilization, because a rubric is impartial. A student either meets the defined objectives or does not. This helps promote fairness and increases satisfaction, since there is no preferential treatment when everyone is measured using the same benchmarks.

A rubric is surprisingly versatile and can be crafted to meet the needs of any assignment. The variety of rubrics available creates flexibility to meet a wide range of assignments. Holistic rubrics identify all factors for an assignment using a checklist or description. Analytical rubrics provide scales and a set of scores for multiple criteria (2008). There is a wealth of rubric resources available to help instructors build their own. Any search on the Internet for “rubric builder” will provide many sites. There also are many websites with specific assignment examples by topic for instructors.

Examples of materials that can be evaluated with a rubric:

• Research reports
• Answers on essay exams
• Individual and group presentations
• Poster presentations
• Participation as a member of a team or group

Rubrics can be used in a variety of ways:

• Communicate expectations about “what counts” as high-quality versus lower quality work
• Reflection and self-assessment of one’s work
• Assigning grades to student assignments and exams

Types of rubrics:

1) Holistic Rubric:

Rubric consists of a set of descriptors that generate a single, global score for the entire work.

2) Analytic Rubric:

Rubric is comprised of a set of focused holistic rubrics for specific components that will be evaluated independently. These components might be reported separately or they might be combined to create a global score that is used for determining a grade.

Why do we use rubric? How will using a rubric can help us as a teacher?

1. Rubrics create a focus on instruction and learning.

2. Rubrics improve the clarity of the feedback provided to students – students get a clear description of their strengths and weaknesses.

3. Rubrics characterize the desired results/products of student work objectively-they give students clear instruction about the instructor’s expectations for an assignment.

4. Rubrics are operational definitions for the standards used to evaluate performance – enables multiple graders to evaluate student work consistently and reliably.

5. Students can use a rubric to assess their own work – they can have a better idea about whether they are meeting expectations before they submit their work for formal evaluation; thus, rubric develop competence in self-evaluation.

6. Rubric engage students in the learning process-when students can describe exactly what is expected of them, they may be more strongly motivated to work to meet these expectations.