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Responding, Evaluating, Grading

Rubric for a Research Proposal

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Review article, appropriate criteria: key to effective rubrics.

• Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States

True rubrics feature criteria appropriate to an assessment's purpose, and they describe these criteria across a continuum of performance levels. The presence of both criteria and performance level descriptions distinguishes rubrics from other kinds of evaluation tools (e.g., checklists, rating scales). This paper reviewed studies of rubrics in higher education from 2005 to 2017. 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. 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. 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. Rubrics using this kind of language may be expected to be more useful for grading than for learning. Finally, no relationship was found between type or quality of rubric and study results. All studies described positive outcomes for rubric use.

A 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 ). 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.

Other assessment tools, like rating scales and checklists, are sometimes confused with rubrics. Rubrics, checklists, and rating scales all have criteria; the scale is what distinguishes them. Checklists ask for dichotomous decisions (typically has/doesn't have or yes/no) for each criterion. Rating scales ask for decisions across a scale that does not describe the performance. 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). 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. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the types of rubrics that have been studied in higher education.

Rubrics have been analyzed in several different ways. One important characteristic of rubrics is whether they are general or task-specific ( Arter and McTighe, 2001 ; Arter and Chappuis, 2006 ; Brookhart, 2013 ). General rubrics apply to a family of similar tasks (e.g., persuasive writing prompts, mathematics problem solving). 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. 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. 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.

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 ). 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 ). 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 ). 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.

Another important way to characterize rubrics is whether they are analytic or holistic. Analytic rubrics consider criteria one at a time, which means they are better for feedback to students ( Arter and McTighe, 2001 ; Arter and Chappuis, 2006 ; Brookhart, 2013 ; Brookhart and Nitko, 2019 ). Holistic criteria consider all the criteria simultaneously, requiring only one decision on one scale. This means they are better for grading, for times when students will not need to use feedback, because making only one decision is quicker and less cognitively demanding than making several.

Rubrics have been characterized by the number of criteria and number of levels they use. The number of criteria should be linked to the intended learning outcome(s) to be assessed, and the number of levels should be related to the types of decisions that need to be made and to the number of reliable distinctions in student work that are possible and helpful.

Dawson (2017) recently summarized a set of 14 rubric design elements that characterize both the rubrics themselves and their use in context. His intent was to provide more precision to discussions about rubrics and to future research in the area. His 14 areas included: specificity, secrecy, exemplars, scoring strategy, evaluative criteria, quality levels, quality definitions, judgment complexity, users and uses, creators, quality processes, accompanying feedback information, presentation, and explanation. In Dawson's terms, this study focused on specificity, evaluative criteria, quality levels, quality definitions, quality processes, and presentation (how the information is displayed).

Four recent literature reviews on the topic of rubrics ( Jonsson and Svingby, 2007 ; Reddy and Andrade, 2010 ; Panadero and Jonsson, 2013 ; Brookhart and Chen, 2015 ) summarize research on rubrics. Brookhart and Chen (2015) updated Jonsson and Svingby's (2007) comprehensive literature review. Panadero and Jonsson (2013) specifically addressed the use of rubrics in formative assessment and the fact that formative assessment begins with students understanding expectations. They posited that rubrics help improve student learning through several mechanisms (p. 138): increasing transparency, reducing anxiety, aiding the feedback process, improving student self-efficacy, or supporting student Self-regulation.

Reddy and Andrade (2010) addressed the use of rubrics in post-secondary education specifically. They noted that rubrics have the potential to identify needs in courses and programs, and have been found to support learning (although not in all studies). The found that the validity and reliability of rubrics can be established, but this is not always done in higher education applications of rubrics. Finally, they found that some higher education faculty may resist the use of rubrics, which may be linked to a limited understanding of the purposes of rubrics. Students generally perceive that rubrics serve purposes of learning and achievement, while some faculty members think of rubrics primarily as grading schemes (p. 439). In fact, rubrics are not as easy to use for grading as some traditional rating or point schemes; the reason to use rubrics is that they can support learning and align learning with grading.

Some criticisms and challenges for rubrics have been noted. Nordrum et al. (2013) summarized words of caution from several scholars about the potential for the criteria used in rubrics to be subjective or vague, or to narrow students' understandings of learning (see also Torrance, 2007 ). In a backhanded way, these criticisms support the thesis of this review, namely, that appropriate criteria are the key to the effectiveness of a rubric. Such criticisms are reasonable and get their traction from the fact that many ineffective or poor-quality rubrics exist, that do have vague or narrow criteria. A particularly dramatic example of this happens when the criteria in a rubric are about following the directions for an assignment rather than describing learning (e.g., “has three sources” rather than “uses a variety of relevant, credible sources”). Rubrics of this kind misdirect student efforts and mis-measure learning.

Sadler (2014) argued that codification of qualities of good work into criteria cannot mean the same thing in all contexts and cannot be specific enough to guide student thinking. He suggests instantiation instead of codification, describing a process of induction where the qualities of good work are inferred from a body of work samples. In fact, this method is already used in classrooms when teachers seek to clarify criteria for rubrics ( Arter and Chappuis, 2006 ) or when teachers co-create rubrics with students ( Andrade and Heritage, 2017 ).

Purpose of the Study

A number of scholars have published studies of the reliability, validity, and/or effectiveness of rubrics in higher education and provided the rubrics themselves for inspection. This allows for the investigation of several research questions, including:

(1) What are the types and quality of the rubrics studied in higher education?

(2) Are there any relationships between the type and quality of these rubrics and reported reliability, validity, and/or effects on learning and motivation?

Question 1 was of interest because, after doing the previous review ( Brookhart and Chen, 2015 ), I became aware that not all of the assessment tools in studies that claimed to be about rubrics were characterized by both criteria and performance level descriptions, as for true rubrics ( Andrade, 2000 ). The purpose of Research Question 1 was simply to describe the distribution of assessment tool types in a systematic manner.

Question 2 was of interest from a learning perspective. Various types of assessment tools can be used reliably ( Brookhart and Nitko, 2019 ) and be valid for specific purposes. An additional claim, however, is made about true rubrics. Because the performance level descriptions describe performance across a continuum of work quality, rubrics are intended to be useful for students' learning ( Andrade, 2000 ; Brookhart, 2013 ). The criteria and performance level descriptions, together, can help students conceptualize their learning goal, focus on important aspects of learning and performance, and envision where they are in their learning and what they should try to improve ( Falchikov and Boud, 1989 ). Thus I hypothesized that there would not be a relationship between type of rubric and conventional reliability and validity evidence. However, I did expect a relationship between type of rubric and the effects of rubrics on learning and motivation, expecting true descriptive rubrics to support student learning better than the other types of tools.

This study is a literature review. Study selection began with the data base of studies selected for Brookhart and Chen (2015) , a previous review of literature on rubrics from 2005 to 2013. Thirty-six studies from that review were done in the context of higher education. I conducted an electronic search for articles published from 2013 to 2017 in the ERIC database. This yielded 10 additional studies, for a total of 46 studies. The 46 studies have the following characteristics: (a) conducted in higher education, (b) studied the rubrics (i.e., did not just use the rubrics to study something else, or give a description of “how-to-do-rubrics”), and (c) included the rubrics in the article.

There are two reasons for limiting the studies to the higher education context. One, most published studies of rubrics have been conducted in higher education. I do not think this means fewer rubrics are being used in the K-12 context; I observe a lot of rubric use in K-12. Higher education users, however, are more likely to do a formal review of some kind and publish their results. Thus the number of available studies was large enough to support a review. Two, given that more published information on rubrics exists in higher education than K-12, limiting the review to higher education holds constant one possible source of complexity in understanding rubric use, because all of the students are adult learners. Rubrics used with K-12 students must be written at an appropriate developmental or educational level. The reason for limiting the studies to ones that included a copy of the rubrics in the article was that the analysis for this review required classifying the type and characteristics of the rubrics themselves.

Information about the 46 studies was entered into a spreadsheet. Information noted about the studies included country, level (undergraduate or graduate), type (rubric, rating scale, or point scheme), how the rubric considered criteria (analytic or holistic), whether the performance level descriptors were truly descriptive or used rating scale and/or numerical language in the levels, type of construct assessed by the rubrics (cognitive or behavioral), whether the rubrics were used with students or just by instructors for grading, sample, study method (e.g., case study, quasi-experimental), and findings. Descriptive and summary information about these classifications and study descriptions was used to address the research questions.

As an example of what is meant by descriptive language in a rubric, consider this excerpt from Prins et al. (2016) . This is the performance level description for Level 3 of the criterion Manuscript Structure from a rubric for research theses (p. 133):

All elements are logically connected and keypoints within sections are organized. Research questions, hypotheses, research design, results, inferences and evaluations are related and form a consistent and concise argumentation.

Notice that a key characteristic of the language in this performance level description is that it describes the work. Thus for students who aspire to this high level, the rubric depicts for them what their work needs to look like in order to reach that goal.

In contrast, if performance level descriptions are written in evaluative language (for example, if the performance level description above had read, “The paper shows excellent manuscript structure”), the rubric does not give students the information they need to further their learning. Rubrics written in evaluative language do not give students a depiction of work at that level and, therefore, do not provide a clear description of the learning goal. An example of evaluative language used in a rubric can be found in the performance level descriptions for one of the criteria of an oral communication rubric ( Avanzino, 2010 , p. 109). This is the performance level description for Level 2 (Adequate) on the criterion of Delivery:

Speaker's delivery style/use of notes (manuscript or extemporaneous) is average; inconsistent focus on audience.

Notice that the key word in the first part of the performance level description, “average,” does not give any information to the student about what average delivery looks like in regard to style and use of notes. The second part of the performance level description, “inconsistent focus on audience,” is descriptive and gives students information about what Level 2 performance looks like in regard to audience focus.

Results and Discussion

The 46 studies yielded 51 different rubrics because several studies included more than one rubric. The two sections below take up results for each research question in turn.

Type and Quality of Rubrics

Table 1 displays counts of the type and quality of rubrics found in the studies. Most of the rubrics (29 out of 51, 57%) were analytic, descriptive rubrics. This means they considered the criteria separately, requiring a separate decision about work quality for each criterion. In addition, it means that the performance level descriptions used descriptive, as opposed to evaluative, language, which is expected to be more supportive of learning. Most commonly, these rubrics described four (14) or five (8) performance levels.

Table 1 . Types of rubrics used in studies of rubrics in higher education.

Four of the 51 rubrics (8%) were holistic, descriptive rubrics. This means they considered the criteria simultaneously, requiring one decision about work quality across all criteria at once. In addition, the performance level descriptions used the desired descriptive language.

Three of the rubrics were descriptive and task-specific. One of these was an analytic rubric and two were holistic rubrics. None of the three could be shared with students, because they would “give away” answers. Such rubrics are more useful for grading than for formative assessment supporting learning. This does not necessarily mean the rubrics were not of quality, because they served well the grading function for which they were designed. However, they represent a missed opportunity to support learning as well as grading.

A few of the rubrics were not written in a descriptive manner. Six of the analytic rubrics and one of the holistic rubrics used rating scale language and/or listed counts of occurrences of elements in the work, instead of describing the quality of student learning and performance. Thus 7 out of 51 (14%) of the rubrics were not of the quality that is expected to be best for student learning ( Arter and McTighe, 2001 ; Arter and Chappuis, 2006 ; Andrade, 2010 ; Brookhart, 2013 ).

Finally, eight of the 51 rubrics (16%) were not rubrics but rather rating scales (5) or point schemes for grading (3). It is possible that the authors were not aware of the more nuanced meaning of “rubric” currently used by educators and used the term in a more generic way to mean any scoring scheme.

As the heart of Research Question 1 was about the potential of the rubrics used to contribute to student learning, I also coded the studies according to whether the rubrics were used with students or whether they were just used by instructors for grading. Of the 46 studies, 26 (56%) reported using the rubrics with students and 20 (43%) did not use rubrics with students but rather used them only for grading.

Relation of Rubric Type to Reliability, Validity, and Learning

Different studies reported different characteristics of their rubrics. I charted studies that reported evidence for the reliability of information from rubrics (Table 2 ) and the validity of information from rubrics (Table 3 ). For the sake of completeness, Table 4 lists six studies that presented their work with rubrics in a descriptive case-study style that did not fit easily into Table 2 or Table 3 or in Table 5 (below) about the effects of rubrics on learning. With the inclusion of Table 4 , readers have descriptions of all 51 rubrics in all 46 studies reported under Research Question 1.

Table 2 . Reliability evidence for rubrics.

Table 3 . Validity evidence for rubrics.

Table 4 . Descriptive case studies about developing and using rubrics.

Table 5 . Studies of the effects of rubric use on student learning and motivation to learn.

Reliability was most commonly studied as inter-rater reliability, arguably the most important for rubrics because judgment is involved in matching student work with performance level descriptions, or as internal consistency among criteria. Construct validity was addressed with a variety of methods, from expert review to factor analysis; some studies also addressed consequential evidence for validity with student or faculty questionnaires. No discernable patterns were found that indicated one form of rubric was preferable to another in regard to reliability or validity. Although this conforms to my hypothesis, this result is also partly because most of the studies' reported results and experience with rubrics were positive, no matter what type of rubric was used.

Table 5 describes 13 studies of the effects of rubrics on learning or motivation, all with positive results. Learning was most commonly operationalized as improvement in student work. Motivation was typically operationalized as student responses to questionnaires. In these studies as well, no discernable pattern was found regarding type of rubric. Despite the logical and learning-based arguments made in the literature and summarized in the introduction to this article, rubrics with both descriptive and evaluative performance level descriptions both led to at least some positive results for students. Eight of these studies used descriptive rubrics and five used evaluative rubrics. It is possible that the lack of association of type of rubric with study findings is a result of publication bias, because most of the studies had good things to say about rubrics and their effects. The small sample size (13 studies) may also be an issue.

Conclusions

Rubrics are becoming more and more evident as part of assessment in higher education. Evidence for that claim is simply the number of studies that are published investigating this new and growing interest and the assertions made in those studies about rising interest in rubrics.

Research Question 1 asked about the type and quality of rubrics published in studies of rubrics in higher education. The number of criteria varies widely depending on the rubric and its purpose. Three, four, and five are the most common number of levels. While most of the rubrics are descriptive—the type of rubrics generally expected to be most useful for learning—many are not. Perhaps most surprising, and potentially troubling, is that only 56% of the studies reported using rubrics with students. If all that is required is a grading scheme, traditional point schemes or rating scales are easier for instructors to use. The value of a rubric lies in its formative potential ( Panadero and Jonsson, 2013 ), where the same tool that students can use to learn and monitor their learning is then used for grading and final evaluation by instructors.

Research Question 2 asked whether rubric type and quality were related to measurement quality (reliability and validity) or effects on learning and motivation to learn. Among studies in this review, reported reliability and validity was not related to type of rubric. Reported effects on learning and/or motivation were not related to type of rubric. The discussion above speculated that part of the reason for these findings might be publication bias, because only studies with good effects—whatever the type of rubric they used—were reported.

However, we should not dismiss all the results with a hand-wave about publication bias. All of the tools in the studies of rubrics—true rubrics, rating scales, checklists—had criteria. The differences were in the type of scale and scale descriptions used. Criteria lay out for students and instructors what is expected in student work and, by extension, what it looks like when evidence of intended learning has been produced. Several of the articles stated explicitly that the point of rubrics was to make assignment expectations explicit (e.g., Andrade and Du, 2005 ; Fraser et al., 2005 ; Reynolds-Keefer, 2010 ; Vandenberg et al., 2010 ; Jonsson, 2014 ; Prins et al., 2016 ). The criteria are the assignment expectations: the qualities the final work should display. The performance level descriptions instantiate those expectations at different levels of competence. Thus, one firm conclusion from this review is that appropriate criteria are the key to effective rubrics. Trivial or surface-level criteria will not draw learning goals for students as clearly as substantive criteria. Students will try to produce what is expected of them. If the criterion is simply having or counting something in their work (e.g., “has 5 paragraphs”), students need not pay attention to the quality of what their work has. If the criterion is substantive (e.g., “states a compelling thesis”), attention to quality becomes part of the work.

It is likely that appropriate performance level descriptions are also key for effective rubrics, but this review did not establish this fact. A major recommendation for future research is to design studies that investigate how students use the performance level descriptions as they work, in monitoring their work, and in their self-assessment judgments. Future research might also focus on two additional characteristics of rubrics ( Dawson, 2017 ): users and uses and judgment complexity. Several studies in this review established that students use rubrics to make expectations explicit. However, in only 56% of the studies were rubrics used with students, thus missing the opportunity to take advantage of this important rubric function. Therefore, it seems important to seek additional understanding of users and uses of rubrics. In this review, judgment complexity was a clear issue for one study ( Young, 2013 ). In that study, a complex rubric was found more useful for learning, but a holistic rating scale was easier to use once the learning had occurred. This hint from one study suggests that different degrees of judgment complexity might be more useful in different stages of learning.

Rubrics are one way to make learning expectations explicit for learners. Appropriate criteria are key. More research is needed that establishes how performance level descriptions function during learning and, more generally, how students use rubrics for learning, not just that they do.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: criteria, rubrics, performance level descriptions, higher education, assessment expectations

Citation: Brookhart SM (2018) Appropriate Criteria: Key to Effective Rubrics. Front. Educ . 3:22. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2018.00022

Received: 01 February 2018; Accepted: 27 March 2018; Published: 10 April 2018.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2018 Brookhart. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Susan M. Brookhart, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Transparency in Assessment – Exploring the Influence of Explicit Assessment Criteria

Rubric for a Research Proposal

Matthew pearson, writing across the curriculum.

Rubric Design

Main navigation, articulating your assessment values.

Reading, commenting on, and then assigning a grade to a piece of student writing requires intense attention and difficult judgment calls. Some faculty dread “the stack.” Students may share the faculty’s dim view of writing assessment, perceiving it as highly subjective. They wonder why one faculty member values evidence and correctness before all else, while another seeks a vaguely defined originality.

Writing rubrics can help address the concerns of both faculty and students by making writing assessment more efficient, consistent, and public. Whether it is called a grading rubric, a grading sheet, or a scoring guide, a writing assignment rubric lists criteria by which the writing is graded.

Why create a writing rubric?

• It makes your tacit rhetorical knowledge explicit
• It articulates community- and discipline-specific standards of excellence
• It links the grade you give the assignment to the criteria
• It can make your grading more efficient, consistent, and fair as you can read and comment with your criteria in mind
• It can help you reverse engineer your course: once you have the rubrics created, you can align your readings, activities, and lectures with the rubrics to set your students up for success
• It can help your students produce writing that you look forward to reading

How to create a writing rubric

Create a rubric at the same time you create the assignment. It will help you explain to the students what your goals are for the assignment.

• Consider your purpose: do you need a rubric that addresses the standards for all the writing in the course? Or do you need to address the writing requirements and standards for just one assignment?  Task-specific rubrics are written to help teachers assess individual assignments or genres, whereas generic rubrics are written to help teachers assess multiple assignments.
• Begin by listing the important qualities of the writing that will be produced in response to a particular assignment. It may be helpful to have several examples of excellent versions of the assignment in front of you: what writing elements do they all have in common? Among other things, these may include features of the argument, such as a main claim or thesis; use and presentation of sources, including visuals; and formatting guidelines such as the requirement of a works cited.
• Then consider how the criteria will be weighted in grading. Perhaps all criteria are equally important, or perhaps there are two or three that all students must achieve to earn a passing grade. Decide what best fits the class and requirements of the assignment.

Consider involving students in Steps 2 and 3. A class session devoted to developing a rubric can provoke many important discussions about the ways the features of the language serve the purpose of the writing. And when students themselves work to describe the writing they are expected to produce, they are more likely to achieve it.

At this point, you will need to decide if you want to create a holistic or an analytic rubric. There is much debate about these two approaches to assessment.

Comparing Holistic and Analytic Rubrics

Holistic scoring .

Holistic scoring aims to rate overall proficiency in a given student writing sample. It is often used in large-scale writing program assessment and impromptu classroom writing for diagnostic purposes.

General tenets to holistic scoring:

• Responding to drafts is part of evaluation
• Responses do not focus on grammar and mechanics during drafting and there is little correction
• Marginal comments are kept to 2-3 per page with summative comments at end
• End commentary attends to students’ overall performance across learning objectives as articulated in the assignment
• Response language aims to foster students’ self-assessment

Holistic rubrics emphasize what students do well and generally increase efficiency; they may also be more valid because scoring includes authentic, personal reaction of the reader. But holistic sores won’t tell a student how they’ve progressed relative to previous assignments and may be rater-dependent, reducing reliability. (For a summary of advantages and disadvantages of holistic scoring, see Becker, 2011, p. 116.)

Here is an example of a partial holistic rubric:

Summary meets all the criteria. The writer understands the article thoroughly. The main points in the article appear in the summary with all main points proportionately developed. The summary should be as comprehensive as possible and should be as comprehensive as possible and should read smoothly, with appropriate transitions between ideas. Sentences should be clear, without vagueness or ambiguity and without grammatical or mechanical errors.

A complete holistic rubric for a research paper (authored by Jonah Willihnganz) can be  downloaded here.

Analytic Scoring

Analytic scoring makes explicit the contribution to the final grade of each element of writing. For example, an instructor may choose to give 30 points for an essay whose ideas are sufficiently complex, that marshals good reasons in support of a thesis, and whose argument is logical; and 20 points for well-constructed sentences and careful copy editing.

General tenets to analytic scoring:

• Reflect emphases in your teaching and communicate the learning goals for the course
• Emphasize student performance across criterion, which are established as central to the assignment in advance, usually on an assignment sheet
• Typically take a quantitative approach, providing a scaled set of points for each criterion
• Make the analytic framework available to students before they write  

Advantages of an analytic rubric include ease of training raters and improved reliability. Meanwhile, writers often can more easily diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their work. But analytic rubrics can be time-consuming to produce, and raters may judge the writing holistically anyway. Moreover, many readers believe that writing traits cannot be separated. (For a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of analytic scoring, see Becker, 2011, p. 115.)

For example, a partial analytic rubric for a single trait, “addresses a significant issue”:

• Excellent: Elegantly establishes the current problem, why it matters, to whom
• Above Average: Identifies the problem; explains why it matters and to whom
• Competent: Describes topic but relevance unclear or cursory
• Developing: Unclear issue and relevance

A  complete analytic rubric for a research paper can be downloaded here.  In WIM courses, this language should be revised to name specific disciplinary conventions.

Whichever type of rubric you write, your goal is to avoid pushing students into prescriptive formulas and limiting thinking (e.g., “each paragraph has five sentences”). By carefully describing the writing you want to read, you give students a clear target, and, as Ed White puts it, “describe the ongoing work of the class” (75).

Writing rubrics contribute meaningfully to the teaching of writing. Think of them as a coaching aide. In class and in conferences, you can use the language of the rubric to help you move past generic statements about what makes good writing good to statements about what constitutes success on the assignment and in the genre or discourse community. The rubric articulates what you are asking students to produce on the page; once that work is accomplished, you can turn your attention to explaining how students can achieve it.

Works Cited

Becker, Anthony.  “Examining Rubrics Used to Measure Writing Performance in U.S. Intensive English Programs.”   The CATESOL Journal  22.1 (2010/2011):113-30. Web.

White, Edward M.  Teaching and Assessing Writing . Proquest Info and Learning, 1985. Print.

Further Resources

CCCC Committee on Assessment. “Writing Assessment: A Position Statement.” November 2006 (Revised March 2009). Conference on College Composition and Communication. Web.

Gallagher, Chris W. “Assess Locally, Validate Globally: Heuristics for Validating Local Writing Assessments.” Writing Program Administration 34.1 (2010): 10-32. Web.

Huot, Brian.  (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning.  Logan: Utah State UP, 2002. Print.

Kelly-Reilly, Diane, and Peggy O’Neil, eds. Journal of Writing Assessment. Web.

McKee, Heidi A., and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss DeVoss, Eds. Digital Writing Assessment & Evaluation. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press, 2013. Web.

O’Neill, Peggy, Cindy Moore, and Brian Huot.  A Guide to College Writing Assessment . Logan: Utah State UP, 2009. Print.

Sommers, Nancy.  Responding to Student Writers . Macmillan Higher Education, 2013.

Straub, Richard. “Responding, Really Responding to Other Students’ Writing.” The Subject is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Boynton/Cook, 1999. Web.

White, Edward M., and Cassie A. Wright.  Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide . 5th ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. Print.

Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates

A rubric is a scoring tool that identifies the different criteria relevant to an assignment, assessment, or learning outcome and states the possible levels of achievement in a specific, clear, and objective way. Use rubrics to assess project-based student work including essays, group projects, creative endeavors, and oral presentations.

Rubrics can help instructors communicate expectations to students and assess student work fairly, consistently and efficiently. Rubrics can provide students with informative feedback on their strengths and weaknesses so that they can reflect on their performance and work on areas that need improvement.

How to Get Started

Best practices, moodle how-to guides.

• Workshop Recording (Fall 2022)
• Workshop Registration

Step 1: Analyze the assignment

The first step in the rubric creation process is to analyze the assignment or assessment for which you are creating a rubric. To do this, consider the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the assignment and your feedback? What do you want students to demonstrate through the completion of this assignment (i.e. what are the learning objectives measured by it)? Is it a summative assessment, or will students use the feedback to create an improved product?
• Does the assignment break down into different or smaller tasks? Are these tasks equally important as the main assignment?
• What would an “excellent” assignment look like? An “acceptable” assignment? One that still needs major work?
• How detailed do you want the feedback you give students to be? Do you want/need to give them a grade?

Step 2: Decide what kind of rubric you will use

Types of rubrics: holistic, analytic/descriptive, single-point

Holistic Rubric. A holistic rubric includes all the criteria (such as clarity, organization, mechanics, etc.) to be considered together and included in a single evaluation. With a holistic rubric, the rater or grader assigns a single score based on an overall judgment of the student’s work, using descriptions of each performance level to assign the score.

Advantages of holistic rubrics:

• Can p lace an emphasis on what learners can demonstrate rather than what they cannot
• Save grader time by minimizing the number of evaluations to be made for each student
• Can be used consistently across raters, provided they have all been trained

Disadvantages of holistic rubrics:

• Provide less specific feedback than analytic/descriptive rubrics
• Can be difficult to choose a score when a student’s work is at varying levels across the criteria
• Any weighting of c riteria cannot be indicated in the rubric

Analytic/Descriptive Rubric . An analytic or descriptive rubric often takes the form of a table with the criteria listed in the left column and with levels of performance listed across the top row. Each cell contains a description of what the specified criterion looks like at a given level of performance. Each of the criteria is scored individually.

Advantages of analytic rubrics:

• Provide detailed feedback on areas of strength or weakness
• Each criterion can be weighted to reflect its relative importance

Disadvantages of analytic rubrics:

• More time-consuming to create and use than a holistic rubric
• May not be used consistently across raters unless the cells are well defined
• May result in giving less personalized feedback

Single-Point Rubric . A single-point rubric is breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria, but instead of describing different levels of performance, only the “proficient” level is described. Feedback space is provided for instructors to give individualized comments to help students improve and/or show where they excelled beyond the proficiency descriptors.

Advantages of single-point rubrics:

• Easier to create than an analytic/descriptive rubric
• Perhaps more likely that students will read the descriptors
• Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended
• May removes a focus on the grade/points
• May increase student creativity in project-based assignments

Disadvantage of analytic rubrics: Requires more work for instructors writing feedback

Step 3 (Optional): Look for templates and examples.

You might Google, “Rubric for persuasive essay at the college level” and see if there are any publicly available examples to start from. Ask your colleagues if they have used a rubric for a similar assignment. Some examples are also available at the end of this article. These rubrics can be a great starting point for you, but consider steps 3, 4, and 5 below to ensure that the rubric matches your assignment description, learning objectives and expectations.

Step 4: Define the assignment criteria

Make a list of the knowledge and skills are you measuring with the assignment/assessment Refer to your stated learning objectives, the assignment instructions, past examples of student work, etc. for help.

  Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria:

• Collaborate with co-instructors, teaching assistants, and other colleagues
• Brainstorm and discuss with students
• Can they be observed and measured?
• Are they important and essential?
• Are they distinct from other criteria?
• Are they phrased in precise, unambiguous language?
• Revise the criteria as needed
• Consider whether some are more important than others, and how you will weight them.

Step 5: Design the rating scale

Most ratings scales include between 3 and 5 levels. Consider the following questions when designing your rating scale:

• Given what students are able to demonstrate in this assignment/assessment, what are the possible levels of achievement?
• How many levels would you like to include (more levels means more detailed descriptions)
• Will you use numbers and/or descriptive labels for each level of performance? (for example 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and/or Exceeds expectations, Accomplished, Proficient, Developing, Beginning, etc.)
• Don’t use too many columns, and recognize that some criteria can have more columns that others . The rubric needs to be comprehensible and organized. Pick the right amount of columns so that the criteria flow logically and naturally across levels.

Step 6: Write descriptions for each level of the rating scale

Artificial Intelligence tools like Chat GPT have proven to be useful tools for creating a rubric. You will want to engineer your prompt that you provide the AI assistant to ensure you get what you want. For example, you might provide the assignment description, the criteria you feel are important, and the number of levels of performance you want in your prompt. Use the results as a starting point, and adjust the descriptions as needed.

Building a rubric from scratch

For a single-point rubric , describe what would be considered “proficient,” i.e. B-level work, and provide that description. You might also include suggestions for students outside of the actual rubric about how they might surpass proficient-level work.

For analytic and holistic rubrics , c reate statements of expected performance at each level of the rubric.

• Consider what descriptor is appropriate for each criteria, e.g., presence vs absence, complete vs incomplete, many vs none, major vs minor, consistent vs inconsistent, always vs never. If you have an indicator described in one level, it will need to be described in each level.
• You might start with the top/exemplary level. What does it look like when a student has achieved excellence for each/every criterion? Then, look at the “bottom” level. What does it look like when a student has not achieved the learning goals in any way? Then, complete the in-between levels.
• For an analytic rubric , do this for each particular criterion of the rubric so that every cell in the table is filled. These descriptions help students understand your expectations and their performance in regard to those expectations.

Well-written descriptions:

• Describe observable and measurable behavior
• Use parallel language across the scale
• Indicate the degree to which the standards are met

Step 7: Create your rubric

Create your rubric in a table or spreadsheet in Word, Google Docs, Sheets, etc., and then transfer it by typing it into Moodle. You can also use online tools to create the rubric, but you will still have to type the criteria, indicators, levels, etc., into Moodle. Rubric creators: Rubistar , iRubric

Step 8: Pilot-test your rubric

Prior to implementing your rubric on a live course, obtain feedback from:

• Teacher assistants

Try out your new rubric on a sample of student work. After you pilot-test your rubric, analyze the results to consider its effectiveness and revise accordingly.

• Limit the rubric to a single page for reading and grading ease
• Use parallel language . Use similar language and syntax/wording from column to column. Make sure that the rubric can be easily read from left to right or vice versa.
• Use student-friendly language . Make sure the language is learning-level appropriate. If you use academic language or concepts, you will need to teach those concepts.
• Share and discuss the rubric with your students . Students should understand that the rubric is there to help them learn, reflect, and self-assess. If students use a rubric, they will understand the expectations and their relevance to learning.
• Consider scalability and reusability of rubrics. Create rubric templates that you can alter as needed for multiple assignments.
• Maximize the descriptiveness of your language. Avoid words like “good” and “excellent.” For example, instead of saying, “uses excellent sources,” you might describe what makes a resource excellent so that students will know. You might also consider reducing the reliance on quantity, such as a number of allowable misspelled words. Focus instead, for example, on how distracting any spelling errors are.

Example of an analytic rubric for a final paper

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper, single-point rubric, more examples:.

• Single Point Rubric Template ( variation )
• Analytic Rubric Template make a copy to edit
• A Rubric for Rubrics
• Bank of Online Discussion Rubrics in different formats
• Mathematical Presentations Descriptive Rubric
• Math Proof Assessment Rubric
• Kansas State Sample Rubrics
• Design Single Point Rubric

Technology Tools: Rubrics in Moodle

• Moodle Docs: Rubrics
• Moodle Docs: Grading Guide (use for single-point rubrics)

Tools with rubrics (other than Moodle)

• Google Assignments
• Turnitin Assignments: Rubric or Grading Form

Other resources

• DePaul University (n.d.). Rubrics .
• Gonzalez, J. (2014). Know your terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics . Cult of Pedagogy.
• Goodrich, H. (1996). Understanding rubrics . Teaching for Authentic Student Performance, 54 (4), 14-17. Retrieved from   
• Miller, A. (2012). Tame the beast: tips for designing and using rubrics.
• Ragupathi, K., Lee, A. (2020). Beyond Fairness and Consistency in Grading: The Role of Rubrics in Higher Education. In: Sanger, C., Gleason, N. (eds) Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.

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Gratitude for KU peer reviewers

One hundred sixty-eight.

• Creating four discipline-specific standing review panels and a fifth panel focused specifically on racial equity awards
• Providing bias training for reviewers
• Revising evaluation rubrics across all competitions based on best practices for avoiding bias
• Publishing evaluation rubrics to assist with proposal preparation

As we continue to assess and reflect on the peer review process and its outcomes, please share your recommendations with us . In the meantime, please join me in thanking this year’s reviewers. And please consider serving in this critical role if you are invited in the future. Belinda Sturm Interim Vice Chancellor for Research

2023-24 Peer Reviewers

The following KU faculty and staff served as peer reviewers for one or more internal grant and achievement award programs or limited submission competitions sponsored by the Office of Research during the 2023-24 academic year. We are grateful to each of you for devoting your time and expertise to helping us identify promising research, scholarship and creative activity for support and recognition — and for providing constructive feedback to applicants as they continue to pursue their lines of inquiry.

Every effort has been made to ensure this list is complete. If you discover a name is missing, please alert Mindie Paget at [email protected] .

• Perry Alexander , AT&T Foundation Distinguished Professor, electrical engineering & computer science, director, Institute for Information Sciences
• Mike Amlung , associate professor, applied behavioral science and associate scientist, Life Span Institute
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• Beth Bailey , Foundation Distinguished Professor, history
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