Rubric (academic) facts for kids

A rubric is like a special guide that teachers use to grade your schoolwork. Think of it as a checklist or a set of rules that explains exactly what makes a good assignment. It helps teachers score your work fairly.

Rubrics usually show you:

• What things your teacher will look at (like how well you wrote, or if your project works).
• What different levels of quality look like (for example, what makes an "excellent" answer versus a "good" one).
• How points will be given.

Teachers often use rubrics when they are grading. You can also use them to plan your work and make sure you include everything needed. In some places, like the UK, "rubric" can also mean the instructions at the top of a test paper.

A scoring rubric helps everyone understand what a high-quality assignment looks like. Since the rules are clear, both teachers and students can see exactly what is expected. Rubrics can also help you check your own work or give feedback to your friends. They aim to make grading fair and help you understand how to improve your learning. This way of giving feedback while you are still learning is called formative assessment.

Experts Bernie Dodge and Nancy Pickett say that scoring rubrics often have these features:

• They measure a specific goal, like a skill or a behavior.
• They use a range to rate how well you did.
• They describe different levels of performance, showing how much you've improved or how well you met a standard.

What's in a Scoring Rubric?

Scoring rubrics have different parts that help measure your work. These parts include:

• Criteria: These are the different things your work will be judged on.
• Levels: This is the rating scale for each criterion, like "Excellent," "Good," or "Needs Improvement."
• Descriptors: These are the definitions or examples that explain what each level means for each criterion.

Another way to think about the parts of a rubric, according to Herman, Aschbacher, and Winters, is:

• The main points or skills that will be judged.
• Clear explanations and examples for each point.
• A scale to rate each point.
• Examples of what great work looks like at different levels.

Since the 1980s, many rubrics have been made as tables or grids. This makes them easy to read and use.

Rubrics can be different types: holistic, analytic, or developmental.

• Holistic rubrics give one overall score for your entire work. For example, when a teacher gives you a single letter grade (A, B, C) for an essay, that's a holistic judgment. They look at everything together.
• Analytic rubrics break down your work into different parts and give a separate score for each part. For example, a teacher might give you one score for your spelling and grammar, another for how you organized your ideas, and another for the content of your essay. This helps you see exactly where you did well and where you need to improve. Analytic rubrics are used in many subjects, like writing, art, and sports.
• Developmental rubrics are a type of analytic rubric that also show how your skills grow over time.

How to Create a Scoring Rubric

Creating and using scoring rubrics can help you understand your own work and your classmates' work better. It can also help teachers grade more quickly. Here are some steps to make a rubric for writing assignments:

Look at Examples

First, look at examples of good work and work that isn't so good. Your teacher can show you different samples of assignments so you can see the difference.

List What Matters

Next, make a list of the things that will be judged in the assignment. Talk about what makes a good quality assignment. Getting your ideas helps the teacher understand what you already know about writing.

Describe Quality Levels

Then, describe different levels of quality for each item on your list. These levels should go from not-so-good to excellent. You can base these levels on the examples you looked at earlier. Using a few clear levels makes the rubric easy to use.

Practice Using the Rubric

Practice using the rubric on sample assignments. This helps you understand how your teacher will use the rubric to grade your papers. It also helps you and your teacher agree on how fair and helpful the rubric is.

Check Your Own Work

Ask yourself and your classmates to use the rubric to check your work. This is called self-assessment and peer-assessment.

Improve Your Work

As you work on your assignment, stop sometimes to check your own progress using the rubric. Also, give and get feedback from your classmates. Then, use this feedback to make your work better.

Teacher Grades Your Work

Finally, your teacher will use the same rubric you used to grade your finished assignment.

When to Use Scoring Rubrics

Rubrics are great for grading individual assignments, big projects, or capstone projects (a big project you do at the end of a course). They are also useful when several people need to grade the same assignment, helping them all focus on the same important parts. Rubrics are perfect for projects because each part of the project can have its own section on the rubric with clear rules for good work.

Developmental Rubrics Explained

Developmental rubrics are a special kind of analytic rubric. They use different stages of growth to help with grading, planning lessons, and helping you learn in new ways.

What Makes Them Developmental?

Developmental rubrics show how skills or practices change over time. They describe different ways people do things in a certain field. These ways appear in a certain order because of how common they are, how well they are performed, how much effort is put in, and how accepted they are. When you learn and change from one way of doing things to the next, it's called transformative learning.

Common stages in developmental rubrics are often called:

• Beginning
• Exploring
• Sustaining
• Inspiring

It's normal to be at a "beginning" stage in one skill while being at an "inspiring" stage in another. Developmental rubrics have four key features:

• They describe examples of behaviors.
• They have different areas (dimensions), each with a few stages that can't happen at the same time.
• The stages within each area show a clear path of growth.
• They can be used for very different time periods and situations.

How to Create Developmental Rubrics

1. Find a group of experts in a field who have experience teaching others. 2. Each expert works with an interviewer to create a chart that shows their experiences. These charts are then combined to make a set of developmental rubrics for the whole group. 3. The experts then use the rubrics to grade student work. They meet to compare their grades and make changes to the rubric if there are different ways of understanding it. 4. Teachers share these rubrics with students and point out the skills they should aim for in the course. Usually, a course focuses on only a few skills and one stage of growth for each. 5. Finally, the rubrics are used in real-time to help students improve. Teachers often focus on one skill at a time and talk about how students can reach the next stage of development.

Where Did the Word "Rubric" Come From?

The word rubric originally came from the Latin word rubrica, which meant "red ochre" or "red ink." In the past, headings or important instructions in documents, especially church service directions, were often written in red. This is why the word "rubric" was used.

In modern education, rubrics became an assessment tool around the mid-1990s. It's thought that the word was chosen because rubrics act like extra information added to text, showing what makes a successful piece of work. It might also be linked to the red ink teachers often use for marking!

The idea of rubrics in education grew from "Standardized Developmental Ratings" used for writing assessments in the 1970s. These helped train graders for exams. In this new sense, a scoring rubric is a set of criteria and standards that are usually connected to what you are supposed to learn. It helps assess or talk about projects, performances, or tasks.

Why Rubrics Are Helpful

Scoring rubrics can also make grading more consistent. When teachers use a rubric, their grading is more reliable. This means that different students get graded fairly, and different teachers teaching the same class can grade in a similar way.

See also

In Spanish: Rúbrica (docencia) para niños

• Authentic assessment
• Concept inventory
• Educational assessment
• Educational technology
• Standards-based assessment
• Technology integration