Terrific Rubric to Help You Create Rubrics for Your Class

May 27, 2014
Rubrics serve a wide variety of purposes most important of which is to guide the instructional process in class towards a set of predefined goals. Although most of teachers subsume the function of rubrics in solely assessing and evaluating students learning, I like to think of rubrics as guiding frameworks, a sort of road map that demonstrates the aims and objectives we want to achieve behind a certain task and features the set of requirements to be met for this task to be finished successfully. In this broad sense, you can create rubrics for assessing students learning, for creating lesson plans, for using classroom time, for reading materials, for writing assignments and any other pedagogical activity that needs some organizing structure.

Related: Two Useful Web Tools for Creating Rubrics

In her popular graphic " Rubrics, Why Use Them? Why Embrace Them ?" Mia featured some important reasons why teachers should consider integrating rubrics in their teaching. Some of these reasons include:

• Rubrics enable teachers to better focus each learning event to address the rubric elements
• A rubric allows teachers to assess based on the expectations in the rubric
• A rubric lets the learner know what is expected from the beginning
• Rubrics are tangible in writing.
• Rubrics provide teachers with a determined goal which they can more easily explain.
• Rubrics specify each assignment element so the learner can focus.
• Rubrics allow learners to compare their work to the rubric before submission.
• Rubrics are specified and uniform for all learners, leaving little room for unfair grading
• Rubrics can be used as a guide for teachers to address, and give feedback for each issue in an assignment.

Creating a rubric is also a task that needs a rubric to guide and organize it. To this end, the folks in BIE designed this wonderful rubric entitled " Rubric for Rubrics" in which they outlined a set of criteria  you need to respect in order to create an effective rubric. These criteria are divided into 5 categories and each of these categories is assessed against three levels: Below, Approaching, Meeting.

The first category is about "selection and clarity of criteria. The second one is about the distinction between levels or columns. Next comes the criterion of quality of writing followed by another criterion on "student involvements " and the final category is about "the use of rubric to communicate expectations and guide students".

Next time you want to create a rubric for some sort of pedagogical activity in your class, make sure the criteria outlined in this rubric are clearly defined within the rubric you create.

You can access and download the rubric from this page.

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