4 Guidelines for Assessment Using Rubrics

Notes from workshop from the WASC Assessment Leadership Academy presented by Mary Allen. Mary Allen writes on her hand out “Developing and Applying Rubrics” June 14, 2011 WASC Assessment Leadership Academy

1. “Rubrics provide criteria for assessing students’ work. …Rubrics can be used to provide formative feedback to students, to grade students, and/or to assess courses and programs.”

2. There are two kinds of scoring for rubrics:

•  Holistic scoring = results in one overall score
• Analytic Rubrics = separate, holistic scoring of specified characteristics of a product or behavior

3. Rubrics can be useful to conduct program assessment or course assessment or General Education Assessment.

4. Rubrics can be calibrated between raters to insure inter-rater reliability for assessment.

• Have two people score independently and both scores are recorded
• Have pairs of readers collaborate to come up with a unified score
  Methodology:
•  Collect evidence and remove identifying information
•  Develop and pilot the rubric
• Select exemplars of student work that have a variety of quality – to include gamut of quality from terrible to excellent.
• Discuss how you will score and conduct sample scoring to discuss.
• Create a spreadsheet and enter scores and review results immediately after scoring.
• If there is a big discrepancy in rating between two readers then the rubric should be cleaned up.

Ground Rules:

• Don’t disclose information about a particular student or faculty member.
• Acknowledge the creators of the rubric.
• Do not make norm-referenced judgement– do not grade on the curve