Using Rubrics for Performance-Based Assessment

A Practical Guide to Evaluating Student Work

Todd Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000490299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Writing a rubric that can accurately evaluate student work can be tricky. Rather than a single right or wrong answer, rubrics leave room for interpretation and thus subjectivity. How does a teacher who wants to use performance-based assessment in this day and age of educational data and SMART goals find a way to reliably assess student work? The solution is to write clear rubrics that allow the evaluator to objectively assess student work. This book will show classroom teachers not only how to create their own objective rubrics, which can be used to evaluate performance assessments, but also how to develop rubrics that measure hard-to-assess skills, such as leadership and grit, and how to empower their own students to create rubrics that are tailored to their work.

Chapter 1 What Is a Rubric?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003239390-2

Before we can get into constructing objective rubrics that assess hard-tomeasure skills, it is important to both understand and determine what a rubric is. A rubric, in its simplest form, is merely an established criterion for assessing the mastery of outlined skills and/or content. To put it even simpler, a rubric shows you what an assignment would look like if it were done right, and also what it would look like if there were areas that needed improvement. In a deeper sense, a rubric is like a blueprint. Architects make blueprints so that other people can build structures, such as a house. An architect designs the house, where fixtures might go, where to put walls, and how big or small each element of the construction needs to be. Someone else, however, builds this house, so the blueprint needs to be clear enough that someone who had nothing to do with its creation knows what he or she is doing while using it. If the blueprint is done well, the builder can construct the house exactly like the architect intended. Tire same applies to a rubric. A teacher makes a rubric to act as a blueprint for his or her students. If the students do what is asked of them in the rubric, they will have shown mastery of the skill the rubric intends to evaluate. And just like the blueprint for a builder, if students do not follow the rubric, there is the possibility that there will be problems with the finished product—perhaps even a shaky foundation.

A rubric is also a guide for the rater—in most cases, the teacher. The rubric clearly defines what good work look likes and, equally important, what poor work looks like. The rubric should be descriptive rather than evaluative. That is not to say that it cannot be used to evaluate a performance, but that the rater should “match the performance to the description rather than ‘judge’ it” (Brookhart, 2013, p. 4). The rater should determine how each aspect of a student’s performance fits into the descriptions outlined in the rubric. Figure 1 is a snippet from a rubric that shows what descriptions might look like. The example is from a rubric for a mock museum exhibit, in which students were tasked with creating an exhibit to show what they learned during a sixth-grade unit about the Egyptians.

Clear descriptions are used to help the rater visualize what the final product should look like at various levels. For instance, for the description of the display, not only does the rubric use the word “professional,” but also it lays out what this professionalism would look like, “like an exhibit that would appear in a real-life museum.” These types of descriptions continue on the next two levels, comparing the middle range of performance to “a high-quality school project,” and not looking professional to “like no time or effort was put into its creation.” Each of these descriptions can be visualized by the rater, as he or she is likely to have seen examples of all three of these in his or her experiences.

Formative and Summative Rubrics

Rubrics can be both formative and summative. A formative rubric shapes or forms students’ learning. It is used to monitor the students’ learning process. The rubric is not written in stone or meant to be an end-all, be-all. Instead, a formative rubric is designed to be revisited, added to, altered, and changed. Take, for example, Figure 2, which is a rubric for social and emotional learning.

You could use this rubric to determine a student’s level of understanding of social and emotional skills. Notice that these levels are synonymous with Webb's (2002) depth-of-knowledge (DOK) levels. The lower skills are simply knowing the skill, which is a DOK 1 of recall. The intermediate skills call for applying this skill, or DOK 2, while the higher skills ask students to make conscious decisions or think about them and use them appropriately, which is DOK 3.

A teacher might use this rubric at the beginning of the lesson and determine that a student is simply in the lower skills. As the lesson progresses, however, the student begins to not only know, but also perform, the skill, moving him or her into the intermediate skills. And then the teacher is walking down the hallway one day and sees the same student counseling an upset friend, demonstrating the higher level of skills. This rubric could be used throughout the lesson—and beyond—to determine the growth of the student.

A summative assessment, on the other hand, is usually not recording the process and progress of a skill, but rather the culmination of learning said skill. For instance, let us say that a student has been tasked with delivering a presentation.

FIGURE 1. Example rubric descriptions.

FIGURE 2. Example rubric for social and emotional learning. Adapted from Marzano, 2015.

The rubric would not be used throughout the process other than as a blueprint for what the final product should look like. The rubric is used when the student gives the final performance. It might look something like Figure 3, which is a rubric designed to evaluate a group project and presentation about a world religion.

Hie teacher would have this rubric in front of her as the students were giving the presentation, marking what is present and what is not in the performance according to the descriptions in the rubric. The rubric does not assess the effort of the students throughout the preparation of the presentation. It simply assesses the final product, which is what makes it summative.

word Religions Presentation

FIGURE 3. Example summative assessment rubric.

There are times, however, when a rubric can be both formative and summative. Take, for example, Figure 4, a rubric for assessing a research paper about Westward expansion. This rubric could be used by the teacher to generate a summative evaluation at the end of the lesson, indicating what grade a student earned with her cumulative research paper. The student could also use the rubric prior to turning in the assignment in order to refine it and fix mistakes. The student can either go over the paper herself using the rubric or ask a peer to do so. By doing this, the student learns where she is in the learning process, making efforts to close any gap should she recognize it. For example, using the rubric, the student could look over her paper and realize that she does not provide many examples throughout. Given the descriptor, “Student provides plenty of examples to support statements made in the paper,” the student reviews her research and adds an example for every statement she makes. The student has then used the rubric to learn how to properly write a research paper. The rubric formed the student’s learning process. Tire teacher also can use this same rubric when the student turns in her research paper. The teacher can use the rubric to create a cumulative evaluation, giving the student a final grade for the unit, making it a summative assessment.

Westward Expansion Paper

FIGURE 4. Example formative and summative assessment rubric.

What Is a Rubric?

A rubric is used to assess mastery for performance-based tasks. Here is a list of various performance assessments (Stanley, 2014):

• ✓ oral presentations,
• ✓ debates/speeches,
• ✓ role playing,
• ✓ group discussions,
• ✓ interviews,
• ✓ portfolios,
• ✓ exhibitions,
• ✓ essays,
• ✓ research papers, and
• ✓ journals/student logs. (p. 43)

There are two directions you can take when developing a rubric. Hie rubric can be applied to the assessment, such as the rubric and essay described in Figure 5. The evaluator would have this rubric next to her when going over the work, determining the proper level that best describes the performance of the essay. She might read a

FIGURE 5. Sample essay assessment rubric.

response a student has given and apply the B range to it because, although the student mentioned historians, Olympics, medicine, the court system, and democracy, he only explained what the Olympics were, not really explaining their importance to the current world.

You can also reverse this process, taking into account what is provided in the assessment and applying the various levels of the rubric to it. If students were creating a podcast, the rubric might look like Figure 6. While the teacher listens to the podcast, she would determine how to rate it based on the rubric descriptors. If there are just a couple of times when the speakers are hard to hear, the teacher would rate the podcast in the middle tier of the rubric. And if the podcast lasted for 13 minutes, then the teacher would rate the podcast in the top tier. She would try to determine at which levels the assessment fits into the rubric—the end result being a completed rubric that will provide the student with an evaluation.

If a rubric is well written, the teacher should easily be able to match the description with the actions taken in the performance. This is where the subjectivity is taken out of the equation, which is why a well-written rubric is essential for an objective assessment.

What a Rubric Is Not

The major challenge of using a rubric is that it only measures what is written in the rubric. In other words, if there is nothing in the rubric about research skills, and yet the student uses such skills in order to show what she has learned, the evaluator will not be able to rate this specific skill. A rubric is only as good as it is written.

Ideally, you wa...