Rubric Teacher Resource Guide and Activities

Rubric Resource Guide and Activities

If you haven't notice yet, we take rubrics pretty serious around here. Rubrics are wonderful assessment tools. They make assessing a subjective task or skill fair for all to the greatest extent possible. Below you find a wide range of our available rubric resources.

What Are Rubrics?

How To Make Rubrics

Science Rubrics

Report Card Comments

What Is a Rubric?

Being a teacher, if you've never used a rubric as an evaluation tool to assess your student's work, then you're missing out! Using a rubric will help you realize that it makes the evaluation process simple and transparent. It sets the tone for the expectations you have from your students.

Rubrics are often assigned to students before they are assessed to make them aware of expected learning and performance outcomes.

The use of rubrics by teachers helps students identify the connection between learning and evaluations. It provides them detailed feedback on their performance, helping them assess how well versed they are on a topic and how much more effort is required to be invested in a topic or subject.

First, let's understand what a rubric is and its purpose in the teaching and learning process!

What Is a Rubric and How Useful a Tool Is It in the Evaluation Process?

Teachers use rubrics to evaluate students' work, assignments, class participation, etc. A rubric in an evaluation or scoring tool or instrument highlights the criteria against which the students' work will be evaluated. This includes both written and oral work.

A rubric consists of grids, schemas, or lists that evaluate students' learning outcomes across several pre-set criteria'.

A rubric sets learning goals for students and measures how well the students have attained those goals against the set criterion. This ensures consistency in how students are marked.

Rubrics have proven to be an effective evaluation tool as they allow students to understand what is expected of them in terms of academic performance in assignments and tests. Rubrics are often provided to students halfway through an assigned task so that they can get an understanding of what still needs to be done before final submission.

One of the biggest advantages of rubrics is allowing students to reflect on their performance and helping teachers provide the appropriate instruction or support to address any learning gaps.

Want to Make a Rubric? Here's how!

Making a rubric is a rather simple process. You can also involve your students in the process. For a rubric to be effective, it must be designed with care and precision to ensure that teachers assign and receive the work expected from students.
Follow these simple steps to create a rubric!

1. Identify Goals and Learning Outcomes

The first step in forming a rubric is to identify and evaluate your expectations from the students in terms of learning outcomes. It would help if you decided on how detailed you want the performance feedback to be and how you will break down the goals and expectations for that particular task or assignment. This step also involves deciding how to assess performance and the level of expectations that students must reach to achieve exceptional grades.

2. Determine the Performance Criteria

Once you have determined your learning outcomes, it is time to determine the criteria for performance. In this step, you must brainstorm skills and knowledge that you want to assess your students for on a particular assignment. Group these skills according to their similarity and eliminate anything that may not be critical in evaluating learning outcomes.

You must ensure that the criteria you set are measurable and unambiguous. You must be able to spot or identify the criteria quickly when you are assessing your student's work. It should also be simple enough for the students to understand so that they know what is expected of them

List all the criteria along the left column of the rubric. Examples are as follows:

- Quality of content
- Grammar, usage, & mechanics
- Language
- Logic and organization
- Development of ideas

Pro tip: You can use free printable rubric templates online and customize them according to your requirements.

3. Decide Performance Levels for Each Criterion

After deciding and listing the performance criteria, it is now time to decide the performance levels for each criterion. This involves describing the best and worst quality levels for each criterion. On average, rating scales have around 3 to 5 performance levels. It is up to you to arrange these performance levels from highest to lowest or vice versa.

4. Add Descriptors or Numerical Scores for Each Performance Level of Your Rubric

Use words to describe the performance levels. You can utilize several different types of rating scales to do this. The example is as follows:

Excellent → Good → Satisfactory → Needs Improvement

You can also give numerical labels to these performance levels, making them easier to mark. The example is as follows:

Excellent (5) → Good (4) → Satisfactory (3) → Needs Improvement (2) → Poor (1)

The most important and challenging part is adding descriptions under each performance level. For example, under Excellent, for judging the "spelling and grammar", you can write "Excellent use of vocabulary. No spelling errors found across the essay. The writing perfectly accomplishes the objectives of the assignment”.
It would help if you did this for all performance levels. This is a time-consuming task, and you must ensure that all your descriptions are measurable.

5. Form a Grid

Now that you have the list of the performance criteria and the performance levels for each criterion, it is time to put these things together to form a grid. You can download rubric templates online and customize your rubric according to your requirements. Vertically write the performance criteria along the left column and the performance levels on the top.

6. Practice the Use of Rubrics and Share It With Your Students

Use the rubric and share it with your students and allow them to assess if it is fair. You can then update or revise your rubric accordingly.

To Wrap Up

Using rubrics is an effective evaluation tool that allows you to assess your students' work on several pre-set criteria. It helps students understand what is expected of them and how they need to improve. Use them to make the process of scoring easy for you.