Rubric

A rubric is a word or section of text that is traditionally written or printed in red ink for emphasis. The word derives from the Latin: rubrica, meaning red ochre or red chalk, and originates in Medieval illuminated manuscripts from the 13th century or earlier. In these, red letters were used to highlight initial capitals (particularly of psalms), section headings and names of religious significance, a practice known as rubrication, which was a separate stage in the production of a manuscript.

Rubric can also mean the red ink or paint used to make rubrics, or the pigment used to make it. Although red was most often used, other colours came into use from the late Middle Ages onwards, and the word rubric was used for these also.

Various figurative senses of the word have been extended from its original sense. Usually these senses are used within the set phrase "under [whatever] rubric," for example, "under this rubric, [X is true]," or "[X was done] under the rubric of Y." These senses are defined in part by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate as follows: "an authoritative rule"; "the title of a statute"; "something under which a thing is classed : CATEGORY"; "an explanatory or introductory commentary : GLOSS"; "an established rule, tradition, or custom"; "a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic [assignments] ." (See Merriam-Webster's Collegiate for the full listing.)

Rubric (academic)

In education terminology, rubric means "a scoring guide used to evaluate the quality of students' constructed responses". Rubrics usually contain evaluative criteria, quality definitions for those criteria at particular levels of achievement, and a scoring strategy. They are often presented in table format and can be used by teachers when marking, and by students when planning their work.

The traditional meanings of the word rubric stem from "a heading on a document (often written in red — from Latin, rubrica), or a direction for conducting church services". As shown in the 1977 introduction to the International Classification of Diseases-9, the term has long been used as medical labels for diseases and procedures. The bridge from medicine to education occurred through the construction of "Standardized Developmental Ratings." These were first defined for writing assessment in the mid-1970s and used to train raters for New York State's Regents Exam in Writing by the late 1970s. That exam required raters to use multidimensional standardized developmental ratings to determine a holistic score. The term "rubrics" was applied to such ratings by Grubb, 1981 in a book advocating holistic scoring rather than developmental rubrics. Developmental rubrics return to the original intent of standardized developmental ratings, which was to support student self-reflection and self-assessment as well as communication between an assessor and those being assessed. In this new sense, a scoring rubric is a set of criteria and standards typically linked to learning objectives. It is used to assess or communicate about product, performance, or process tasks.