Welcome to Rubrics to the Rescue!
You have provided engaging, focused, and informative instruction to your students with accurate content. It included a variety of motivating, clear, user-friendly resources, and your learners have engaged with purposeful, applicable, and reliable technology. Now it is time to assess what they have learned! Perhaps you have designed a hands-on project in which your students will have the opportunity to apply components from this specific unit. The next question is, “How will I know that my students have reached the learning goals I set before beginning my instruction?”
The answer? A rubric!
Rubrics: What, Why, and How
What are Rubrics?
Rubrics are assessment tools that indicate a learner’s achievement(s) across various components. Rubrics can be used across a variety of subject areas and in a number of different ways. Rubrics evaluate a project, product, or presentation. A rubric allows teachers to clearly define expectations and help learners to understand what is being assessed in a specific manner. In turn, rubrics help to demystify grades because they clearly state expectations. They also assist teachers in monitoring student progress and allow them to score student work objectively.
Why Use Rubrics?
Rubrics serve the following purposes:
- Support and scaffold student learning
- Assess student work objectively, consistently, and efficiently
- Allow teachers to isolate key concepts
- Evaluate student performance in situations that more closely replicate real life in comparison to an isolated test
- Focus on specific objectives and standards
- Can be used with multiple subject areas including, but not limited to: Mathematics, Writing, Project Based Learning, Digital Citizenship/Technology, Research, Science, Social Studies, Physical Education, Health, Music, and Art projects.
- Provide necessary scaffolding to improve the quality of student work
- Offer flexibility to reuse the same rubric for various assignments
- Allow for the accommodation and differentiation for heterogeneous classes
- Provide students with a clear understanding
- Can be tailored to meet differentiation goals and individual student needs
- Offer the chance for students to utilize metacognition as they think about their own thinking
- Provide parents with a concise, digestible, and well-structured assessment.
- Enable students to learn how to choose correct sources and resources
- Help learners to gain digital citizenship skills