Rubrics describe accomplishments from students on different levels and provide both the lecturers and students with insights into the learning developments and learning achievements. You can use rubrics to provide feedback and assess assignments, papers, theses, presentations, and performance assessments. Rubrics come in different levels: an assignment, a course, a learning path, or a study programme.
Benefits for students
- It is a method with transparency: students can see how they will be assessed.
- Students can see where they are now (feedback), what criteria they need to meet (feed up), and what they need to work on (feedforward) in order to achieve a certain level or a certain score. When they receive feedback they can immediately see what skills they need to work on.
- Rubrics stimulate self-reflection and self-direction for students.
Benefits for lecturers
- It is a tool that allows you to assess in a reliable, valid and consistent manner. The rubric ensures that you maintain the same criteria when assessing.
- If a course has several lecturers and assessors, rubrics will ensure that everyone assesses according to the same criteria.
- Designing rubrics takes a lot of time, but when done properly they will save you that time later in the assessment process.
- It becomes easier to determine what students need to pay additional attention to if you keep track for which components they receive a higher or lower score.
Designing a rubric
A rubric is designed like a table. The rows have the assessment criteria, and the columns have the levels/scores.The fields are filled with descriptions of an accomplishment on a certain level of the criterion.
A rubric is the size of one to two A4 papers at most. It is also important to make sure that you are sufficiently specific, but not too detailed:
- Limit the assessment criteria/rows.
- Do not use enumerations in the cells.
- Describe qualities and not quantities.
Read more about designing rubrics.
Rubrics in Brightspace
You can provide feedback for students in Brightspace and assess them with the help of rubrics. These rubrics can then be used in combination with other Brightspace tools. Read more about feedback and assessment with rubrics in Brightspace.
