General rubrics should be written with descriptive language, as opposed to evaluative language (e.g., excellent, poor) because descriptive language helps students envision where they are in their learning and where they should go next.Īnother important way to characterize rubrics is whether they are analytic or holistic. Some research has borne out this idea, showing that rubrics do make expectations explicit for students ( Jonsson, 2014 Prins et al., 2016) and that students do use rubrics for this purpose ( Andrade and Du, 2005 Garcia-Ros, 2011). In this way, rubrics play a role in the formative learning cycle (Where am I going? Where am I now? Where to next? Hattie and Timperley, 2007) and support student agency and self-regulation ( Andrade, 2010). The prevailing hypothesis about how rubrics help students is that they make explicit both the expectations for student work and, more generally, describe what learning looks like ( Andrade, 2000 Arter and McTighe, 2001 Arter and Chappuis, 2006 Bell et al., 2013 Brookhart, 2013 Nordrum et al., 2013 Panadero and Jonsson, 2013). The generality of the rubric is perhaps the most important characteristic, because general rubrics can be shared with students and used for learning as well as for grading. For example, a task-specific rubric for the characterization essay might specify which pieces of textual evidence the student should have located and what conclusions the student should have drawn from this evidence. For example, a general rubric for an essay on characterization might include a performance level description that reads, “Used relevant textual evidence to support conclusions about a character.” Task-specific rubrics specify the specific facts, concepts, and/or procedures that students' responses to a task should contain. General rubrics apply to a family of similar tasks (e.g., persuasive writing prompts, mathematics problem solving).

One important characteristic of rubrics is whether they are general or task-specific ( Arter and McTighe, 2001 Arter and Chappuis, 2006 Brookhart, 2013). Rubrics have been analyzed in several different ways. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the types of rubrics that have been studied in higher education. Frequency scales are sometimes useful for ratings of behavior, but none of the rating scales offer students a description of the quality of their performance they can easily use to envision their next steps in learning. Common rating scales include numerical scales (e.g., 1–5), evaluative scales (e.g., Excellent-Good-Fair-Poor), and frequency scales (e.g., Always, Usually-Sometimes-Never). Rating scales ask for decisions across a scale that does not describe the performance. Checklists ask for dichotomous decisions (typically has/doesn't have or yes/no) for each criterion. Rubrics, checklists, and rating scales all have criteria the scale is what distinguishes them. Other assessment tools, like rating scales and checklists, are sometimes confused with rubrics. Thus, a rubric has two parts: criteria that express what to look for in the work and performance level descriptions that describe what instantiations of those criteria look like in work at varying quality levels, from low to high. All studies described positive outcomes for rubric use.Ī rubric articulates expectations for student work by listing criteria for the work and performance level descriptions across a continuum of quality ( Andrade, 2000 Arter and Chappuis, 2006). Finally, no relationship was found between type or quality of rubric and study results. Rubrics using this kind of language may be expected to be more useful for grading than for learning. Further, for a few (7 out of 51) rubrics, performance level descriptions used rating-scale language or counted occurrences of elements instead of describing quality. Other types of rubrics have also been studied, and some studies called their assessment tool a “rubric” when in fact it was a rating scale. The types of rubrics studied in higher education to date have been mostly analytic (considering each criterion separately), descriptive rubrics, typically with four or five performance levels.

This paper reviewed studies of rubrics in higher education from 2005 to 2017. The presence of both criteria and performance level descriptions distinguishes rubrics from other kinds of evaluation tools (e.g., checklists, rating scales). True rubrics feature criteria appropriate to an assessment's purpose, and they describe these criteria across a continuum of performance levels. Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.

Thoroughness as element of rubric