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Rubrics have the potential to make enormous contributions to instructional quality-but first we have to correct the flaws that make many rubrics almost worthless.
Rubrics are all the rage these days. It's difficult to attend an educational conference without running into relentless support for the educational payoffs of rubrics. Indeed, the term itself seems to evoke all sorts of positive images. Rubrics, if we believe their backers, are incontestably good things.
But for many educators, rubrics inspire a series of questions. What are rubrics, and where did they come from? What is an educationally appropriate role for rubrics? Why do so many current rubrics fail to live up to their promise as guides for both teachers and students? What should we do to make rubrics better?
The Rudiments of Rubrics
As used today, the term rubric refers to a scoring guide used to evaluate the quality of students' constructed responses-for example, their written compositions, oral presentations, or science projects. A rubric has three essential features: evaluative criteria, quality definitions, and a scoring strategy.
Evaluative criteria are used to distinguish acceptable responses from unacceptable responses. The criteria will obviously vary from rubric to rubric, depending on the skill involved. For instance, when evaluating written compositions, teachers often use such evaluative criteria as organization, mechanics, word choice, and supporting details. Evaluative criteria can either be given equal weight or be weighted differently.
Quality definitions describe the way that qualitative differences in students' responses are to be judged. For instance, if mechanics is an evaluative criterion, the rubric may indicate that to earn the maximum number of points for mechanics, a student's composition should contain no mechanical errors. The rubric must provide a separate description for each qualitative level. This means that if four different levels of quality are assigned to a written composition's organization, the rubric provides descriptions for each of those levels.
A scoring strategy may be either holistic or analytic. Using a holistic strategy, the scorer takes all of the evaluative criteria into consideration but aggregates them to make a single, overall quality judgment. An analytic strategy requires the scorer to render criterion-bycriterion scores that may or may not ultimately be aggregated into an overall score. The Roots of Rubrics
The original meaning...