“Rubric” is an old word, but is a newcomer in the conversation about college teaching and learning. Even stalwart survival manuals, such as McKeachie's Teaching Tips and Davis' Tools for Teaching, say little about rubrics. The term isn’t usually found in the indices of these and similar books. Emphasis on rubrics in higher education is a recent development, which came as assessment of student learning achieved recognized importance.

In brief, a rubric consists of the disclosed criteria used for the evaluation of a graded response to an open-ended exercise or assignment. The word derives from the Latin rubrica or red, and relates to red print used to direct or redirect readers' attention to text of special importance.

The most important quality of rubrics lies in providing scaffolds to higher level thinking. In adult education, rubrics direct students' attention toward an understanding of how to engage a particular open-ended challenge. Although open-ended assignments have no pat right-or-wrong answers, they do have reasonable and unreasonable solutions. Perception of what constitutes "reasonable" is seldom intuitive, and gaining the ability to arrive at reasonable solutions is usually neither easy nor comfortable. When initially confronted with an open-ended challenge, most students experience frustration and sometimes fear. Ironically these constitute predictable reactions because such assignments remove the accustomed clarity afforded by unique solutions. After years of educational conditioning, students' initial approach will always be to seek a “right answer.” The inevitable failure of that approach confronts them with their own lack of understanding of what constitutes a high quality response to an open-ended question. When they try harder, students often emit a familiar primal scream: “What does the teacher WANT?!” This cry signals what may be the opportunity of a lifetime for the “teachable moment," or it can foreshadow a scarring moment in a student’s intellectual development.

The most common mistake stems from the presumption that students who are "smart" will “figure it out on their own” and, worse, to convey in some way that those who do not “figure it out” are either slackers or dullards. Gaining the "Aha!” victory comes from leading students to understand that a process exists for using evidence in formulating a reasonable response. The hardest thing for many professors to realize at these moments is the amount of structure it takes to bring about an understanding of this process. The essential, indeed, required tool for providing this structure is the rubric. Rubrics help to mentor students toward higher level thinking by directing them to attend to the frameworks with which to distinguish reasonable from unreasonable solutions and weak from strong arguments.

Our first example is at the class lesson level with the assignment: “Explain the historical development of the ‘theory’ of plate tectonics.” The assignment meets an ISU GOAL 5 learning outcome: “Pick a single theory from the science represented by this course and explain its historical development.” The rubric consists of a deceptively simple three lines
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(1) About 500 words maximum (>550 unacceptable--10 pts)
(2) Factual detail (70 pts)
(3) Conveys awareness of relationships (20 pts)

 

The classroom exercise that preceded the assignment consisted of an active learning exercise in which students learned the contributions of twenty individuals from 600 B.C. to 2000 A.D. This served as the basis for factual detail. Indeed, students were used to regurgitating facts as right answers, and the notes from the classroom exercise gave them factual material. However, the 500-word limit posed a dilemma: “How can one possibly get the contributions into this short a paper?” There is only one way to get the required information into this short of a paper; it is to perceive relationships and group ideas and characters together. Once students do this, "Aha! moments" occur across the class like popping corn: one recognizes the difference between a list of facts and understanding them through a framework of reasoning. The simple rubric forced a very high level thinking ability—perceiving relationships and prioritizing them. By the end of the term, almost every student not only met the goal outcome, but also met it at a respectably high level. In an introductory course, it is more important that students have one high level challenge and understand what constitutes a high-quality response than it is to merely pass through only content-learning hurdles or to do several high level challenges poorly.

The situation makes obvious what is perhaps the most important value of a rubric: it provides a stepping stone through which to help students move from thinking of becoming educated as the accumulation of facts to seeing education as the development of more sophisticated reasoning abilities.

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