Does this Rubric Make My Assessment Look Big?
In my office, rubrics are frequently a topic of conversation. Usually I am meeting with a faculty member, or a department chair about an assessment planned for the coming semester. The conversation usually comes around to needing a rubric to evaluate a student performance. So in this article I am sharing the basics about rubrics. Something to get you started if you are currently a non-rubric user, or if you want to improve the rubrics you currently use.
Rubrics at their most basic are a tool used by faculty to help in the task of assessing student learning. Rubrics can be holistic or analytic, general or task specific. Rubrics can assist faculty in assigning grades, or can be used for collecting assessment data.
Holistic vs. analytic Rubrics
Holistic rubrics provide a single score based on the overall performance of a student on a specific task or assignment.
- Advantages: this type of rubric provides the faculty member with a quick scoring method and provides an overview of student achievement.
- Disadvantages: this type of rubric does not provide detailed information, therefore it not provide sufficient feedback to the faculty member
Analytic rubrics provide specific feedback along several dimensions of a student’s performance on a specific task or assignment. Analytic rubrics measure student’s performance along a continuum of skill.
- Advantages: this type of rubric provides more detailed feedback and allows for consistent scoring across students and when used in multiple sections, more consistency among faculty.
- Disadvantage: this type of rubric with multiple dimensions is more time consuming to score.
General vs. task specific
General rubrics contain criteria that are general across tasks in a class or program.
- Advantage: Properly constructed, a general rubric can be used across different tasks and potentially across multiple courses in a program.
- Disadvantage: The criteria in General Rubrics may not provide feedback that is specific enough to measure broader student learning measures.
Task specific rubrics are unique to a specific task in a student assignment or performance.
- Advantage: Faculty members using task-specific rubrics will have more reliable assessment data of performance on the student task.
- Disadvantage: Faculty may find it difficult to construct a rubric for the specific tasks in an assignment or performance. Often it may require pairing down the rubric to the most important components of the assignment.
What type of rubric works best for your purposes?
Write a holistic rubric when:
- You need a high-level view or culminating view of student achievement.
- If a single dimension of student performance is adequate to define the quality of the learning.
Write an analytic rubric when:
- You want assess strengths and weaknesses of student learning in the course or program.
- You want detailed assessment data for the purpose of curriculum improvement.
- You want to assess complicated student skills or performance.
- Analytic rubrics can also be used by students to self-assess their performance.
Write a general rubric when:
- All students are not doing exactly the same task, or the rubric will be used across the curriculum at different intervals.
Write a task-specific rubric when:
- You want to assess specific knowledge gains in your course/program/discipline.
- When scoring consistency is extremely important. An example of this is when a rubric will be used by multiple faculty across sections of the same course.
The Office of Outcomes Assessment has plenty of great rubric resources. From books on how to write rubrics, sample rubrics from your colleagues at JCCC, to VALUE rubrics from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Come check us out and get a handle on your rubrics!
