Rubrics are used to help students self-assess their own work, to accommodate peer review of student work, and for performing both formative and summative assessments. This session will cover best practices for developing four different types of rubrics to work for you.
Rubrics have been around since the 1970s, but became popular in the 1990s especially in K-12 schools. Rubrics are used for numerous purposes in higher education including helping students self-assess their own work, accommodating peer review of student work, and performing both formative and summative assessments for papers, projects, and other assignments. In most academic circles when rubrics are discussed, two types of rubrics emerge, Analytic and Holistic rubrics. While these two rubrics are the most common and widely used, they are not the only types of rubrics available. We have identified four distinctly different types of rubrics that we will share examples of as we briefly discuss the pros and cons, use cases, and best practices for using each one.
At Penn State, many instructional designers and faculty members have used the rubric tool in ANGEL for one or more of the purposes outlined above for years and have come to rely on them for grading assignments and assessments. We are currently about midway through a huge migration from ANGEL, our customized Course Management System (CMS) for the past 17 years to a relatively new CMS called Canvas. As with any change of this magnitude, there is a mixed reactions to the differences including jubilation, consternation, skepticism, anxiety, and even some fear. Canvas will replace ANGEL by June 30, 2017, so we are all working to move over 18,500 courses by that date. The two course management systems are very different from one another in almost every way and there is a pretty steep learning curve for a lot of faculty members and learning designers alike. The change had led to learning designers working with faculty to rethink how certain tasks should be adjusted to take advantage of the pedagogical affordances of the new CMS. This includes several courses that used ANGEL's Rubric tool. The good news is that Canvas also has an easy to use rubric tool that makes grading more consistent, faster and all around easier for faculty. The less than good news is that the rubric tool is fairly simplistic and doesn't allow for much customization which was problematic for some folks. Analytic rubrics worked fine, but the other three were more of a challenge and forced us to think about how to make them work within the system that we were given. So much of this session will be about how we "hacked" the rubrics to make them work without damaging the integrity of the rubrics.
The highlight of this session will be learning how to develop each of the four different types of rubrics using the rubric tool available in Canvas, however, even if Canvas isn't the CMS used at the participants institutions, participants can still learn how to hack standard rubrics to work in any CMS that has a tool to develop rubrics. The information shared in this session will help participants look at rubrics maybe just a little differently then they have before.