For the Love of Rubrics

If you've never used a rubric to score a student project, paper or assignment, you are missing out! Here's what I love about rubrics:

• Outlines the expectations of the assignment clearly
• Helps students understand their score and connect their score to their work.
• Allows students a chance to be confident in what they're doing.
• Helps the teacher evaluate work efficiently
• Gives great feedback to students on their strengths and weaknesses

The basic idea of a rubric is to break an assignment into categories or pieces based on the expectations and then assign each category a point value. Then, you describe levels of performance in that category. Below are a couple of examples.

You can see from the examples that outlining the expectations streamlines the evaluation process. This level of specificity also helps students clearly connect their work to their final score. Also, if students are given the rubric at the beginning of the assignment, they can use the rubric to guide their work and feel confident that they are completing the activity with the right focus.

One strategy I like to use when scoring with a rubric is to have students score their own work on a blank copy of the rubric using a highlighter to select their score in each category. Then, I score their work with a pen on the same copy of the rubric. My score is the one that gets entered into the gradebook, but this comparison allows me to have conversations with students whose scores are different than mine and help them understand their grade.

I find that some students are overly critical of their own work and need to be shown how to score their work based on the evidence and how that evidence lines up with the rubric. On the other hand, some students are overly impressed with their own work and need to be shown that the evidence in their work doesn't support the score they wanted. These discussions result in both improved self scoring next time with a rubric, and in a deeper understanding of how they were evaluated and earned their grade.

Have fun making your own rubrics or borrow one you like and edit it to match your assignment!

Cheerfully yours,
Ms. Guided