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Why Are Rubrics A Good Idea

The document discusses the benefits of using rubrics for teaching and learning. Rubrics support authentic assessment, clearly communicate expectations, improve student performance, provide informative feedback, promote thinking and learning, and inspire fairness. While rubrics have many benefits, constructing a good rubric takes time. Rubrics are best suited for critical assessments, major projects, and assignments requiring multi-dimensional evaluation.

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Karla Lintu
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143 views3 pages

Why Are Rubrics A Good Idea

The document discusses the benefits of using rubrics for teaching and learning. Rubrics support authentic assessment, clearly communicate expectations, improve student performance, provide informative feedback, promote thinking and learning, and inspire fairness. While rubrics have many benefits, constructing a good rubric takes time. Rubrics are best suited for critical assessments, major projects, and assignments requiring multi-dimensional evaluation.

Uploaded by

Karla Lintu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Why are rubrics a good idea? Lots of reasons.

Rubrics are a great tool for teaching and learning. Why?

Rubrics support authentic assessment.

While traditional tests measure how well students recall content, rubrics measure how well
students can apply knowledge to authentic contexts or real-world tasks.

Rubrics clearly communicate expectations.

Because rubrics define student "quality" in terms of objective criteria and standards, they
clearly communicate how instructors will evaluate student performance.

Rubrics improve performance.

Rubrics lead to better student performance. When students understand assignments and
expectations before they begin, they are more likely to fulfill them. They know what specific
criteria and standards of excellence will be used to rate their performance.

Rubrics provide students with informative feedback.

Students learn from a rubric in a way that they can't learn from a single letter grade or a few
comments in the margins. Because rubrics define specific elements of a learning task and
describe levels of quality, instructors can provide informative feedback to students about where
they perform well and where they need improvement.

Rubrics promote thinking and learning.

Rubrics promote thinking and higher levels of learning. Used to provide formative feedback,
rubrics enable students to systematically review and revise their learning assignments,
promoting reflective learning.

Rubrics inspire fairness.

Because rubrics have detailed assessment information, students don't feel that grades are
assigned subjectively or arbitrarily. Also, when you have more than one grader, a rubric allows
all graders to apply the same criteria in the same way.
Rubrics sound great! What's the catch?

Although rubrics have many benefits--and make grading faster and easier--a good rubric takes
time to construct. You'll probably need to change (change, not add to) your grading and
assessment methods, based on what you believe about learning assessment. Rubrics are best for
critical assessments, major projects, and other assignments that require a multi-dimensional
performance evaluation. The trick is to know what type of rubric to create for your situation.

How do rubrics fit into authentic assessment? They're the "real thing."

Rubrics support authentic assessment. They are useful for measuring student performance of
real-world tasks. When you want students to engage in a real world tasks, rather than study
content and take a test, rubrics provide a framework for addressing those tasks, particularly
when they involve several elements, steps, or characteristics. Use your rubric tool for authentic
assessment of real world tasks such as writing reports, making presentations, designing
experiments, demonstrating a professional skill, or solving problems.

Define the Purpose of the Learning Task

The first step in creating any rubric is to clarify the purpose of the assignment and identify what
task (product, performance, or assignment) students should learn. Your rubric is based on the
purpose of the learning task that you will be assessing so it's important that the purpose be well
defined at the beginning.

Choose Your Rubric Type

What are the two types of rubrics? Analytic and holistic.

Analytic Rubrics break down the components of a learning task, giving students feedback on
each component. Typically, each component is scored individually, and those scores are added
for a total. The layout of an analytic rubric is like the examples you have seen so far throughout
this course.

Holistic rubrics provide a broad overview of student performance and allow you to assess a
learning task as a whole. Holistic rubrics provide a single score that gives students an overall
sense of their performance. You can see that the holistic rubric is laid out in a slightly different
way, with the rating scale along the left side with the criteria and descriptors combined under
Description.

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