9 Things to do with Assessment Rubrics

I’ve used rubrics in assessment marking since I first held an academic role some fifteen-ish years ago. For me, rubrics are an essential tool in the assessment toolkit. It’s important to recognize that they are not a ‘silver bullet’ and if not integrated in to teaching and support for learning, they may have no impact whatsoever on student engagement with assessment. I am therefore trying to collate a list of the ways in which rubrics can be used with students to enhance their performance, help them grow confidence and to demystify the assessment process. My top nine, in no particular order, are as follows:

1. Discuss the rubric and what it means. This simply helps set out expectations and requirements, and provides opportunities for clarification.
2. Encourage students to self-assess their own performance using the rubric, so that they engage more deeply with the requirements of the assessment.
3. Encourage students to peer assess each other’s performance using the rubric, leading to further familiarization with the task, as well as the development of critical review and assessment judgment skills. This also allows the seeding of further ideas in relation to the task, through exposure to the work of others.
4. Get students to identify the mark that they are aiming for and re-write the criteria in their own words. This sparks discussion about the requirements, flushes out any issues needing clarity and can result in students raising their aspirations (as the ‘assessment code’ is decrypted there are moments of “If that’s what it mean’s … I can do that”).
5. Facilitate a negotiation of the rubric. Where full student led creation of a rubric is impractical, or not desirable, a tentative rubric can be presented and negotiated with the class. Students can have an influence on the coverage, the language, and the weightings. As well as familiarizing with the requirements, this allows a sense of ownership to develop. In my own experience rubrics are always better for student negotiations.
6. Undertake a class brainstorm as the basis for the rubric design. Ask what qualities should be assessed e.g. report writing skills, then identify what this means to students themselves e.g. flow, use of literature to support argument. Then use this list to develop a rubric. It is a form of negotiation, but specifically it allows the rubric to grow out of student ideas. By using student language, the criteria are already written in a form that is accessible to the group (after all they designed the key components).
7. Simply use the rubric as the basis for formative feedback with students to aid familiarity.
8. Use the criteria to assess exemplars of previous students’ work. This will have the benefits of familiarity, developing assessment judgment as well as sparking new ideas from exposure to past students work. Of course this can be further developed with full sessions or online activities built around exemplar review, but the rubric can be central to this.
9. A rubric can be partially written to offer space for choice. Leaving aspects of the rubric for students to complete leaves room for students to show their individuality and to customize tasks. Rubrics don’t box-us in to total uniformity. Recently I created a rubric for a research project and left space for students to articulate the presentational aspects of the criteria. Some students filled in the rubric to support the production of a report, others a poster and others a journal article.

I have only included approaches that I have used first hand. I’d like to build this up with the experiences of others; if you have additional suggestions please do let me know.