Rubrics
Rubrics can measure the success of nearly any demonstration of mastery, such as creation of an artifact, a performance, or anything else that can be qualitatively described in words.
The descriptions provided by a good rubric serve a dual purpose. Perhaps most importantly from a teacher's perspective, they provide strong, clear guidelines for grading students. By providing detailed descriptors, rubrics can support valid and reliable grading, even when standardized quantitative assessment methods are not available or appropriate. As a bonus, using rubrics can actually help teachers save time grading. In addition, rubrics can provide students with clear expectations to guide their work. If students have access to a well-written rubric prior to completing an assignment, they can know what is expected of them and work toward that end.
Though there are a wide variety of rubrics freely available online, most teachers will eventually need to create a rubric from scratch. There is no single acceptable way to create a rubric, though generally the process begins with writing clear objectives. Only once you know what your students are expected to do can you sort out how they might be judged on their efforts. Also, once the objectives are written, the individual descriptors used in the rubric can usually be modified slightly to create the descriptions for each rating level. (For instance, the objective itself might be used as the acceptable descriptor, while certain adjectives are added to create the excellent descriptor, and certain qualifications are added to create the unacceptable descriptor.)
Writing objectives and descriptors is far from an exact science, and advice on how to write a good rubric varies widely. However, certain issues must be addressed regardless of your rubric writing philosophy. For instance, the levels of concreteness, specificity, and description must be determined to fit your purposes.In general, the more objective a descriptor is, the more consistent the student results will be—students who might not have achieved a high level of quality on their own are clear about what they need to do, but students who would have excelled to even higher quality can be dissuaded from putting in the extra effort once they know what they need to do for a higher score. In contrast, a more subjective descriptor might inspire students to attempt more creative solutions to a problem, but might result in more confusion. In contrast, a more subjective descriptor might inspire students to attempt more creative solutions to a problem, but might result in more confusion.
Whether or not to assign point values to each description (such as 5 points for excellent, 3 points for acceptable, and 1 point for unacceptable) is another question that individual teachers must answer based on their goals. Often, the need to translate the assessment into a percentage for a letter grade dictates the need to incorporate numeric values into rubrics.
To learn more about creating rubrics, explore How To Create A Rubric and How To Create A Rubric From Scratch. You might find tools such as Rubistar valuable in helping you to create a new rubric, so that you are not quite starting from scratch. In addition, it might be worth your time to search the web for rubrics that you might be able to adopt or adapt for use in your own classroom. At the Educational Origami wiki, you will find many examples of ready-made rubrics for use with Web 2.0 Tools (based on Bloom's Digital Taxonomy).Rubrics offer a formal method for assessing the level of a student’s achievement.