Presentation by Dr. Stella C.S. Porto
Part III, Process of Developing and Using Rubrics
Transcript of Video, with PPT images
Graduate School Faculty Meeting
February 28, 2004
Here is the step-by-step process of developing a rubric.
- First, define the learning outcome or objective or goal that students are expected to achieve. (These can be multiple.)
- Then, work backwards defining possible criteria or the performance levels, the levels of proficiency for each of those expectations that students would possibly demonstrate.
Again, during this process, you have to have in mind if youre doing it in a holistic way like that first table that I showed, or if youre doing it in an analytical way with different aspects.
So, this part here actually reflects, if you have, for example, subproducts or specific aspects in there that require different skills, you can use them as anchor products that represent various performances that can be evaluated as high quality or the different level that you have there. Not necessarily high, average, and low, but different levels of proficiency.
- So, after describing those levels, assign scores for each of the levels.
You will try to build the scores in such a way that in the end, when you compute everything, you actually have the spread of quality well done, so the student products will actually have a uniform distribution of quality. - Share the descriptions with the students and ask for feedback. I would consider that [asking for student] feedback is optional, depending on how much time you have. But at least showing them the rubric is a positive thing.
- Another optional thing is actually to have the students use the rubric themselves so theyre comfortable with it.
- An important requirement for the rubric is that the scoring system should be objective and consistent.
It has to be consistent in such a way that a final paper (or whatever the assignment is) that is high quality throughout does end up having a higher score in your scoring system than a paper that is of lower quality.
The expectations should be at the level of the abilities of the students, not an over expectation. - In the handouts there are several links to tools to build rubrics that can provide automated ways of building rubrics. One of the resources is www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/general/.
The number of tasks for which we can use rubrics is enormous:
- Research reports
- Essays
- Group projects
In group projects, probably your rubrics will not be driven only by performance skills related to content, but also you can embed in them skills that are related to group interaction. - Participation
One of the important things in my class, in terms of use of rubrics, was when I built a rubric for participation. Every time I ended the course, I had students saying, How many times did I have to come in this conference and how many posts did I have to have in here? I never had that number. My rule was very qualitative, but I didnt have that expressed on paper. I didnt like, either, to have those threads in which people came in and they said the same thing over and over and over again. I wanted to express all that and not have to say that throughout the course, but say it up front. So, I created a rubric for participation that reflected my own belief of participation thats not necessarily the common belief for other instructors. - Journals
- Term papers
- Exams
The thing with exams, sometimes it is pretty hard to create a rubric, but if you have very specific questions, objective questions, for example, in [technical] courses, where you have a lot of numerical problems, theres not much that I can tell you in terms of expectations. But you can, through a rubric, say things like, If you demonstrate all your steps, this is a higher quality answer. So, the student knows that he might not end up having the correct answer, but if he has shown his process in a clear way such that you can from there grasp his learning, that is something that differentiates him or her in quality.
- I have used rubrics for participation, term papers, long term papers, short essays...
- Not all of them did I share with the students; this is something I started very recently.
The rubric in participation from the start I have always posted in my course content. But the rubric for a term paper, I usually ended up having to tweak it later on in the course and I thought, Its too late to show it to them. This term is actually the first time Im showing students my expectations up front, in terms of having feedback from them. - I dont have any experience yet on having feedback from students about the rubrics I have been using.
What I can say is that since I started using rubric, Ive had a lot of good feedback about my own feedback. I think that the use of the rubric helped me provide more useful feedback about each assignment to the students. And that has been praised many, many times. Students say, oh, you know, I have [taken] a lot of courses in which I just received a grade, or I received see this generic thing about Your work was wonderful, or You should work on it. Those things didnt suggest any intervention that the student could do in their own learning process to change things for further assignments or just enhance their own learning. [By contrast, they were pleased with my level of feedback.] I think the rubrics helped in the sense that it made the process faster to produce useful feedback.
Go to transcripts of sections
- Using Rubrics, Part I - Introduction: Defining Holistic Assessment
- Using Rubrics, Part II - Defining Rubrics and their Benefits
- Using Rubrics, Part III - The Processes of Developing and Using Rubrics
- Using Rubrics, Part IV - Two Examples (Porto), and References
