Everywhere you turn these days, you hear talk of rubrics. Rubrics are one of the newest tools for evaluations, but what are they and how do they work?

Rubrics are pre-established authentic assessment measures by which students are evaluated against developmental standards, rather than one another, to evaluate their quality of learning. Authentic assessment is geared toward the use of assessment methods which correspond as closely as possible to real world experience. The rubric is one authentic assessment tool which is designed to simulate real life activity where students are engaged in solving real-life problems. It is a formative type of assessment because it becomes an ongoing part of the whole teaching and learning process.

The advantages of using rubrics in assessment are that they:

• allow assessment to be more objective and consistent
• focus the teacher to clarify his/her criteria in specific terms
• clearly show the student how their work will be evaluated and what is expected
• promote student awareness of about the criteria to use in assessing peer performance
• provide useful feedback regarding the effectiveness of the instruction
• provide benchmarks against which to measure and document progress

Rubrics can be created in a variety of forms and levels of complexity, however, they all contain common features which:

• focus on measuring a stated objective (performance, behavior, or quality)
• use a range to rate performance
• contain specific performance characteristics arranged in levels indicating the degree to which a standard has been met

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