Assessing students is hard! Rubrics can help with assessing students authentically, communicating instructor’s expectations to encourage student success and more. Join us for this hands-on workshop to learn about four types of rubrics, when to use each type, and most importantly, how to easily write them for the greatest impact.
As educators, we are always looking for quality ways to provide feedback to students that will have a positive impact on student learning. 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, performances and other assignments in authentic ways. If you are just getting started with developing rubrics, you may have quite a few questions - How do you know which rubrics to use for which type of assignments? What information should be included in a rubric? Or how do you know if the rubrics you create are meaningful to your learners? To answer these questions and more, you’ll work through a series of challenges designed to help you move from novice towards expert in your understanding of rubrics and how to create them to match your instructional needs.
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 can be used to assess any type of assignment in a large variety of subjects. One of the co-presenters of this workshop presented on the four types of rubrics last year at OLC Accelerate. The session was pretty popular for Friday morning. This three part workshop actually grew out of the many thought-provoking questions posed by folks from all over the country who participated in the discussion that day.
Part 1 of this workshop will focus on learning about the four types. We’ll begin by introducing each of the four types of rubrics, sharing examples and briefly discussing the pros and cons, potential use cases, and best practices for using each type including their basic anatomy as outlined in the research. In this part of the workshop, we will make sure that there is time for questions and to practice what you have learned in a fun group activity before moving onto the next section.
Part 2 of this workshop will focus on two methods for selecting the right rubric for your purpose. First, we will share a decision tree that we have developed for selecting the best type of rubric for your purpose. You’ll have the opportunity to work collaboratively through the decision tree to understand when and how to utilize rubrics in a variety of scenarios. We encourage you to bring some example assignments to work with during the session. We will also have some examples if you forget or don’t have something ready to share.
Then we will introduce you to a mnemonic device that we use to help develop strong rubrics. This easy to remember device will come in handy as you begin to develop rubrics of your own after the workshop has ended. We will give you time to ask questions and lots of practice using the device in this part of the workshop that will help you be SMART when developing rubrics of your own.
In Part 3 of the workshop, you will begin to write your own rubrics. So once you understand when and how to best use a specific rubric and understand how to utilize the mnemonic device to evaluate your rubric, we’ll engage in two activities to help you learn how to draft the scale and descriptive criteria for your rubric for the activity or assignment that you want to evaluate. We have developed a tool containing a series of rubric starters based on Bloom’s Taxonomy that we hope will make writing rubrics quicker and easier. This web-based tool will be available during and after the session to everyone who attends the workshop. After a brief overview of the tool and a demonstration, the presenters will circulate during this section to answer any questions while you are creating your rubric.
Level of Participation
Active participation in this session will be extensive throughout the three-hour session. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop or tablet and come prepared to engage in discussions both asking and answering questions, sharing challenges you have with evaluating your students work, and working collaboratively with fellow participants to construct rubrics for your own assignments or shared examples. The more you participate, the more you will get out of the session.
Workshop Outcomes
After attending this workshop, participants will be able to name all four types of rubrics, recall some pros and cons and best practices for each type, select the best rubric for a given assignment, use the mnemonic device to evaluate a rubric, and be able to create a scale and write solid criteria for each type of rubric. Participants will be given access to our rubric presentation, our decision tree, the mnemonic device, and our rubric criteria starter tool to use during and after the session end.