Contents
Olivia Fox (Senior Educational Technologist) LEaD, City, University of London
Kathryn Drumm (Educational Technologist) LEaD, City University of London
Professor Pam Parker (Director or LEaD), LEaD, City University of London
Richard Evans (Senior Lecturer Educational Development)
[Paper 2]
Effective rubrics can help improve consistency of marking and speed up the marking process. Rubrics can also help students understand what is required to do well in an assessment and identify their strengths and areas for development.
Rubrics are structured grading forms that contain assessment criteria, qualitative feedback statements and marks (Popham, 1997). Rubrics can help students understand the assessment criteria and the structured feedback can help them to identify strengths and what they need to do to improve in subsequent assessments. (Suskie, 2018; Ragupathi & Lee, 2020).
Well-designed rubrics can help to improve marking consistency between multiple markers (Graham, Harner and Marsham, 2022) and can make it faster for markers to grade assessments. (Suskie, 2018). However, Chakraborty et al. (2021) have highlighted that the quality of the rubric impacts on marking consistency between multiple markers.
To address the challenges in developing effective rubrics, Learning Enhancement and Development (LEaD) at City, University of London have developed three rubrics.
Two of the rubrics are general rubrics (Arter & McTighe, 2001) that staff can use across similar formative and summative essay assessments. General rubrics reused on similar assessments can help students identify their progress over time (Brookhart, 2013, cited in Suskie, 2018 p.197)
These rubrics are analytical where a score or a judgement can be assigned for each or the criteria. (Dawson, 2017; Brookhart, 2018; Suskie, 2018). One rubric is suitable for assessments at Level 5 and the other at Level 7. These can however be adapted for specific assessments.
The final rubric available is what Suskie, 2018:193 describes as a “structured observation guide”. This allows for a more qualitative approach to grading and feedback can be personalised to each student. This rubric is suitable for use at Level 5.
These rubrics are available on a webpage that can be copied into Moodle’s advanced marking feature and are also available as Turnitin rbc files.
This session introduces the templates available and identifies next steps if you want to use and adapt these templates.
References
- Arter, J. A., and McTighe, J. (2001). Scoring Rubrics in the Classroom: Using Performance Criteria for Assessing and Improving Student Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Scoring_Rubrics_in_the_Classroom.html?id=1PAGSvgDTJEC&redir_esc=y (Accessed: 11/03/24)
- Brookhart, S.M. (2018) ‘Appropriate Criteria: Key to Effective Rubrics’ Frontiers in Education. 3 Available from: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2018.00022/full#B6 (Accessed 11/03/24)
- Graham, A.I, Harner, C & Marsham, S (2022) ‘Can assessment-specific marking criteria and electronic comment libraries increase student engagement with assessment and feedback?’ Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47:7, pp. 1071-108
- Chakraborty, S, Dann, C, Mandal, A, Dann, B, Paul, M, Hafeez-Baig, A (2021) ‘Effects of rubric quality on marker variation in higher education’ Studies in Educational Evaluation, Volume 70, 2021
- Dawson, P. (2017) ‘Assessment rubrics: towards clearer and more replicable design, research and practice’ Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42:3, 347-360
- Popham, W.J. (1997) ‘What’s wrong–and what’s right–with rubrics’. Educational leadership (0013-1784), 55 (2), pp. 72-75
- Ragupathi, K. & Lee, A. (2020) ‘Beyond Fairness and Consistency in Grading: The Role of Rubrics in Higher Education’ in Sanger, C.S. and Gleason, N.W. (eds.) Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education : Lessons from Across Asia. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan Springer Nature pp. 73-97 [online] Available from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/reader.action?docID=6112396&ppg=87&pq-origsite=summon (Accessed 12/03/24)
- Suskie, L (2018) Assessing Student Learning : A Common Sense Guide Third Edition [Online] San Franciso: Jossey-Bass Available at https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/city/detail.action?docID=5215462 (Accessed 08/03/24)
