The power of rubrics

Rubrics have been in use for quite some time now in the K-12 education community, but this best practice tool has been a bit slow to catch on in higher ed. A wider acceptance of the tenants of authentic assessment as encouraged by educators and innovators such as Grant Wiggins and Jonathan Mueller, however, has brought with it recognition that rubrics are a great way to facilitate valid measurement of learning, whether you are in the formative or summative stages of a learning task.

A great way to get a sense for the pervasive usefulness of rubric based assessment is to develop and apply a rubric outside of your academic life to see how it works. I created one for my son, who at the time was 11 and interested in earning money but not particularly informed about what a commitment to starting a career in lawn and garden care will entail. For my part, I am interested both in maintaining a nice yard and in teaching him the authentic life lesson that he earns more money when he does the best job possible.

As you may know through your own or nearby children, what you say and what the child hears and processes into an end result are sometimes two different things. In this I am informed by my own childhood, and my own children. So, for my family, the rubric is a great way to organize efforts around a quantifiable result—it represents an “explicit scheme” (Allen, 2003, italics mine) that we mutually understand, and upon which we agree. Allen defines rubrics as “explicit schemes for classifying products or behaviors into categories that vary along a continuum.” But what does the word “explicit” mean in this definition? When one employs rubrics throughout the life-cycle of an assignment or a learning event, “explicit” means that the students and the instructor (or child and parent) are in synch regarding expectations around academic or performance achievement.

One way to illustrate the value of the “explicit” in an academic setting came to me a while back as I was sitting in a meeting between parents and the administration of my son’s middle school. Our local school system was going from letter grades in middle school to a system wherein proficiency goals are stated at the beginning of the school year and then advancement toward meeting these goals is tracked on an ongoing basis, with the end result being an assessment of the student’s abilities around these goals at the end of the year (Advanced, Proficient, Partially Proficient, etc.). Change-averse parents were firing questions at the principal, and one of these questions was simply, “What is wrong with the old system?” Her answer really hits home with me—namely, the old system allows teachers, knowingly or not, to compare one student’s academic achievement to that of other students (this is known as normative comparison). A lack of well defined expectations around actual learning versus classroom behavior allows teachers to grant higher grades to academically lower-performing students based on the fact that they are polite and easy to deal with. The end result of this is that a certain kind of polite student can leave the school year with an unrecognized need for academic intervention. The child’s parents have no idea that this nice kid is unprepared to meet the demands of high school and beyond, because the student’s grades don’t reflect true learning in the way they would if grades were criterion referenced, divorcing behavior (which can be rewarded in other ways) from academic ability.

What benefits do rubrics bring to the learning environment? For students, rubrics are first and foremost a definition of faculty expectations. Rubrics will level the playing field and reduce anxiety so that students can concentrate on studying and learning rather than on figuring out what it is that an instructor is looking for. Another way using rubrics will benefit student learning is through the process of self-assessment. A rubric is a way for students to ask themselves if they have met the criteria put forth in the rubric, and this sharpens their critical thinking and analytic skills. The skill of self-assessment will help the students to navigate the evaluation process in the workplace, which is, in a well-structured and managed environment, a process whereby the employee can rely on a set of expectations defined in a job description or a client’s needs assessment in order to determine if a task is complete and well done.

For the instructor, rubrics enhance communication with the students while improving efficiency in grading. Having expectations “out there” helps because the instructor doesn't have to repeat expectations over and over when grading-- this will save time and frustration! Additionally, rubrics help to document instructor interaction with a student around the requirements of an assignment. The instructor can show that the students had foreknowledge of expectations, that these expectations were available to the student for the duration of the assignment, and that the rubric was used to assign a value to the assignment.

--Vicki Galloway Harsh, M.A.
Sr. Academic Training Consultant