Rublic use in higher education

Reddy, Y.M., & Andrade, H. (2010). A review of rubric use in higher education. Assessment & evaluation in higher education, 35(4), 435–448. doi: 10.1080/02602930902862859

Two studies suggested that rubric use was associated with improved academic performance, while one did not.

A rubric has three essential features: evaluation criteria, quality definitions, and a scoring strategy.

Quality definitions provide a detailed explanation of what a student must do to demonstrate a skill, proficiency or criterion in order to attain a particular level of achievement

Rubrics are often used by teachers to grade student work but many authors argue that they can serve another, more important, role as well: When used by students as part of a formative assessment of their works in progress, rubrics can teach as well as evaluate

The purposes of this review are to examine the type and extent of empirical research on rubrics at the post-secondary level and to stimulate research on rubric use in post-secondary teaching.

is there evidence that rubrics can be used as formative assessments in order to promote learning and achievement in higher education, as opposed to rubric use that serves only the purposes of grading and accountability?

graduate and undergraduate students value rubrics because they clarify the targets for their work, allow them to regulate their progress and make grades or marks transparent and fair.

There is evidence of both positive responses and resistance to rubric use by college and university instructors.

One striking difference between students’ and instructors’ perceptions of rubric use is related to their perceptions of the purposes of rubrics. Students frequently referred to them as serving the purposes of learning and achievement, while instructors focused almost exclusively on the role of a rubric in quickly, objectively and accurately assigning grades.

the use of rubrics to rate student work enabled an instructor to pinpoint the areas of weakness and thereby identify needed improvements in the instruction.

These studies lend support to the view that rubrics have the potential to act as ‘instructional illuminators’ (Popham 1997, 75).

Several studies have shown that rubrics can allow instructors and students to reliably assess performance.

the clarity of the language in a rubric is a matter of validity because an ambiguous rubric cannot be accurately or consistently interpreted by instructors, students or scorers (Payne 2003).

The implication seems to be that simply handing out a rubric cannot be expected to have an impact on student work:

The research reports little study of the validity of the rubrics used.

Future studies should report how the validity of a rubric was established, and the scoring reliability, including rater training and its contribution towards achieving inter-rater reliability, and perhaps even the correlation between rubric-referenced scores and other measures of performance.