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eNews: Professional Development Tips
Creating Rubrics

November 2002

By: Mike Scott, Tom Snyder Productions
Professional Development Consultant

  

Do you love rubrics but cringe at the thought of the time that goes into creating and formatting them? Creating customized, professional-looking rubrics in minutes is much easier than you might think! First, let's think about what a rubric is, what the advantages are in using rubrics, and then look at how easy it is to create your own rubrics.

A rubric is an authentic assessment tool that acts as a scoring guide. Rubrics require that a teacher articulate and define criteria for evaluating student performance. The advantages of using rubrics in assessment are that they:

  • Require teachers and students to define expectations with specific criteria
  • Clearly show the student how their work will be evaluated
  • Provide guidelines students can use during self evaluation and peer review practices
  • Help teachers and students measure and document progress
  • Support teachers as they evaluate the effectiveness of instruction

Most teachers want to use rubrics for all the above-mentioned reasons. The problem is that rubrics can often be time consuming to create. Fortunately, there are Web resources out there that can help teachers get up and running, creating rubrics in minutes. RubiStar (http://rubistar.4teachers.org/) provides generic rubrics that can simply be printed and used for many projects and research assignments. The unique component of RubiStar, however, is that it provides generic rubrics in a format that can be easily customized. Teachers can change almost all suggested text in the rubric to make it best fit their assessment needs. And best of all, this is a free Web resource!

To create a rubric in minutes for evaluating oral presentations, simply follow these easy steps:


Get Started

1. Launch your Internet browser (Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer) and type http://rubistar.4teachers.org/ in the location box.

2. Scroll down and click Oral Presentation in the Oral Projects section.

3. Scroll down and click in the Teacher Name text box and type your name. Click in the Project Name text box and type "How-To Reports."

4. Type your three-digit area code next to Area Phone Code. Note: RubiStar is a free Web site, supported by the US Department of Education, they use the area code to report where people live that use RubiStar. This is the only data collected by the site.

5. Click the Select Rating Scale pull-down menu and select Descriptive Rating Scale. The top row of the rubric will fill in automatically with the four levels of the rating scale.

6. To edit the rating scale, click and drag to highlight the word Excellent and press the Delete key on your keyboard. Type "Wow!"

Select Rubric Categories

7. Click the Select Category pull-down menu. The list of categories for rubric content appears.

8. Click to select Preparedness. Notice the text boxes to the right are automatically filled in with content related to the category selected.

9. Click the Select Category pull-down menu in the second row. Click to select Speaks Clearly as the category for the second row of the rubric.

10. Repeat the above process to select Stays on Topic, Posture and Eye Contact, and Content for the categories for the third, fourth, and fifth rows of the rubric.

Edit Rubric Content

11. Since this is a rubric for a "How-To" oral report, we want to customize the Content category to reflect this type of report. In the Wow! column of the Content row, click and drag to highlight the word topic. Press the delete button and type, "step-by-step process." The text box should now read, "Shows a full understanding of the step-by-step process."

12. Follow the same procedure in the remaining three boxes in the Content row to replace the word topic with the words "step-by-step process."

Save Your Rubric

13. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Make and Save a Printable Rubric.

14. Type your e-mail address and create a password. Click Save and View Rubric.

15. The Saved Rubric Information page opens. If you want to eventually link to this rubric from another Web page, you'll want to write down your Rubric Number and View URL or print out this page.

16. Click the link next to Edit Rubric or Add Categories.

17. Enter your password and click Continue.

Add a Custom Category

18. From the Edit a Custom Rubric page, scroll down to the Add New Rows section at the bottom of the page.

19. In the first column, type "Visual Aids" as the category topic.

20. In the Wow! column, type "Student uses appropriate visual aid(s) that show considerable work/creativity and which make the presentation better."

21. In the Good column, type "Student uses at least one visual aide that shows considerable work/creativity and which make the presentation better."

22. In the Satisfactory column, type "Student uses one visual aide which makes the presentation better."

23. In the Needs Improvement column, type "The student uses no visual aide or the visual aide chosen detracts from the presentation."

24. Click Save Changes and View Rubric.

Print Your Rubric

25. From the File menu, select Print.

 

Where can you find additional resources?

The Tom Snyder Productions Professional Development team specializes in developing and leading full-day and half-day workshops that are customized to help you use technology to improve student learning. Please visit http://www.tomsnyder.com/profdev or call 1-800-342-0236 for more information.

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators: Assessment and Rubric Information
http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/assess.html

Multimedia Mania 2002: Multimedia Rubric
http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink/mm2002.rubric.htm

RubiStar
http://rubistar.4teachers.org/

Rubrics
http://www.rubrics.com/

Understanding Rubrics
http://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinking/docs/rubricar.htm
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