Learning Community: Rubrics and Planning Time

Rubrics are advanced grading forms used for criteria-based assessment. The rubric consists of a set of criteria. For each criterion, several descriptive levels are provided. A numerical grade is assigned to each of these levels. The rater chooses which level answers/describes the given criterion best. The raw rubric score is calculated as a sum of all criteria grades. The final grade is calculated by comparing the actual score with the worst/best possible score that could be received.

What are Rubrics? A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly represents the performance expectations for an assignment or piece of work. A rubric divides the assigned work into component parts and provides clear descriptions of the characteristics of the work associated with each component, at varying levels of mastery. Rubrics can be used for a wide array of assignments: papers, projects, oral presentations, artistic performances, group projects, etc. Rubrics can be used as scoring or grading guides, to provide formative feedback to support and guide ongoing learning efforts, or both.

Rubrics can help instructors communicate their expectations to students and assess student work fairly and efficiently. Rubrics can also provide students with informative feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, and prompt students to reflect on their own work. This page describes how to create and use a grading rubric.

Vance-Granville instructors can login to Moodle to view the Rubrics and Marking Guides resource that is a part of the Moodle Tips and Tricks course.

Conscientious marketing faculty spend extensive hours grading student essays and projects. As instructors work on grading papers, they may wonder how effective their comments are. The author explored how students in a marketing principles class reported their use of various grading methods. Students generally preferred rubrics with ratings and accompanying comments and indicated that they used comments to understand their grades and also to improve their writing. Students appreciated feedback on what they did well on projects and how they could have improved.

As simulation becomes a common teaching strategy in nursing education, faculty struggle with methods for measuring student performance in summative, or evaluative, scenarios. While skills checklists have been shown to be a valid way to quantify performance on many of the technical components of a patient care scenario, nurse educators have also begun to utilize simulation grading rubrics to capture more contextual and critical thinking components. The article describes a pilot study using the Clark Simulation Evaluation Rubric with undergraduate nursing students of different levels from two types of programs. Sixty-nine associate degree and 109 baccalaureate degree students were evaluated and scored in simulation performance using the rubric. The rubric was found to be a practical tool that could potentially be used with or without skills checklists.

Most instructors desire to create a learning environment conducive to deep learning. However, in courses where grades are based upon the accumulation of points, students may focus on collecting points rather than on learning and achieving the course objectives. We discuss an alternative points-free course design based on the development of clear learning objectives, practical descriptions of grades based on these objectives, and open discussions with students about their progress relative to the objectives.