How to Create a Rubric: Introduction

Kelly Roell

 Updated on July 03, 2019

Perhaps you have never even thought about the care it takes to create a rubric. Perhaps you have never even heard of a rubric and its usage in education, in which case, you should take a peek at this article: “What is a rubric?” Basically, this tool that teachers and professors use to help them communicate expectations, provide focused feedback, and grade products, can be invaluable when the correct answer is not as cut and dried as Choice A on a multiple choice test. But creating a great rubric is more than just slapping some expectations on a paper, assigning some percentage points, and calling it a day. A good rubric needs to be designed with care and precision in order to truly help teachers distribute and receive the expected work. 

Steps to Create a Rubric

The following six steps will help you when you decide to use a rubric for assessing an essay, a project, group work, or any other task that does not have a clear right or wrong answer. 

Step 1: Define Your Goal

Before you can create a rubric, you need to decide the type of rubric you’d like to use, and that will largely be determined by your goals for the assessment.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How detailed do I want my feedback to be? 
• How will I break down my expectations for this project?
• Are all of the tasks equally important?
• How do I want to assess performance?
• What standards must the students hit in order to achieve acceptable or exceptional performance?
• Do I want to give one final grade on the project or a cluster of smaller grades based on several criteria?
• Am I grading based on the work or on participation? Am I grading on both?

Once you’ve figured out how detailed you’d like the rubric to be and the goals you are trying to reach, you can choose a type of rubric.

Step 2: Choose a Rubric Type

Although there are many variations of rubrics, it can be helpful to at least have a standard set to help you decide where to start. Here are two that are widely used in teaching as defined by DePaul University’s Graduate Educational department:

• Analytic Rubric: This is the standard grid rubric that many teachers routinely use to assess students’ work. This is the optimal rubric for providing clear, detailed feedback. With an analytic rubric, criteria for the students’ work is listed in the left column and performance levels are listed across the top. The squares inside the grid will typically contain the specs for each level. A rubric for an essay, for example, might contain criteria like “Organization, Support, and Focus,” and may contain performance levels like “(4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, (2) Developing, and (1) Unsatisfactory.”​ The performance levels are typically given percentage points or letter grades and a final grade is typically calculated at the end. The scoring rubrics for the ACT and SAT are designed this way, although when students take them, they will receive a holistic score. 
• Holistic Rubric: This is the type of rubric that is much easier to create, but much more difficult to use accurately. Typically, a teacher provides a series of letter grades or a range of numbers (1-4 or 1-6, for example) and then assigns expectations for each of those scores. When grading, the teacher matches the student work in its entirety to a single description on the scale. This is useful for grading multiple essays, but it does not leave room for detailed feedback on student work. 

Step 3: Determine Your Criteria

This is where the learning objectives for your unit or course come into play. Here, you’ll need to brainstorm a list of knowledge and skills you would like to assess for the project. Group them according to similarities and get rid of anything that is not absolutely critical. A rubric with too much criteria is difficult to use! Try to stick with 4-7 specific subjects for which you’ll be able to create unambiguous, measurable expectations in the performance levels. You’ll want to be able to spot the criteria quickly while grading and be able to explain them quickly when instructing your students. In an analytic rubric, the criteria are typically listed along the left column. 

Step 4: Create Your Performance Levels

Once you have determined the broad levels you would like students to demonstrate mastery of, you will need to figure out what type of scores you will assign based on each level of mastery. Most ratings scales include between three and five levels. Some teachers use a combination of numbers and descriptive labels like “(4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, etc.” while other teachers simply assign numbers, percentages, letter grades or any combination of the three for each level. You can arrange them from highest to lowest or lowest to highest as long as your levels are organized and easy to understand. 

Step 5: Write Descriptors for Each Level of Your Rubric

This is probably your most difficult step in creating a rubric.Here, you will need to write short statements of your expectations underneath each performance level for every single criteria. The descriptions should be specific and measurable. The language should be parallel to help with student comprehension and the degree to which the standards are met should be explained.

Again, to use an analytic essay rubric as an example, if your criteria was “Organization” and you used the (4) Exceptional, (3) Satisfactory, (2) Developing, and (1) Unsatisfactory scale, you would need to write the specific content a student would need to produce to meet each level. It could look something like this:

A holistic rubric would not break down the essay’s grading criteria with such precision. The top two tiers of a holistic essay rubric would look more like this:

• 6 = Essay demonstrates excellent composition skills including a clear and thought-provoking thesis, appropriate and effective organization, lively and convincing supporting materials, effective diction and sentence skills, and perfect or near perfect mechanics including spelling and punctuation. The writing perfectly accomplishes the objectives of the assignment.
• 5 = Essay contains strong composition skills including a clear and thought-provoking thesis, but development, diction, and sentence style may suffer minor flaws. The essay shows careful and acceptable use of mechanics. The writing effectively accomplishes the goals of the assignment.

Step 6: Revise Your Rubric

After creating the descriptive language for all of the levels (making sure it is parallel, specific and measurable), you need to go back through and limit your rubric to a single page. Too many parameters will be difficult to assess at once, and may be an ineffective way to assess students’ mastery of a specific standard. Consider the effectiveness of the rubric, asking for student understanding and co-teacher feedback before moving forward. Do not be afraid to revise as necessary. It may even be helpful to grade a sample project in order to gauge the effectiveness of your rubric. You can always adjust the rubric if need be before handing it out, but once it’s distributed, it will be difficult to retract. 

Teacher Resources:

• Creative Writing Prompts for High School Students
• 14 Ways to Write Better in High School
• The Top Reading Skills to Teach Your Students
• Great Books to Recommend To Teens

Roell, Kelly. (2020, August 26). How to Create a Rubric in 6 Steps. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/how-to-create-a-rubric-4061367

REPLY

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Decodables-Update-November-2020

As a teacher, I felt fortunate. The first job I took in Chicago Public Schools in 2007 was at a school where the administration truly valued student and staff input. I remember sitting with students as we interviewed potential new teachers and the students saying things like, “This teacher doesn’t seem like they will be a good fit for our school family.”

The entire school staff worked incredibly hard to give our students every opportunity possible. The issue was that our school (like many across the country) did not have the resources it needed. We watched our already thin school budget be decimated by more budget cuts. We let go of administrators, counselors, librarians and teachers.

The reduction in school staff immediately impacted the students. They lost supportive adults who had built relationships with them. The inequity in the system was tragic and profound. As educators, we would tell our students they could become anything, while simultaneously teaching them in a school building that had no soap in the bathrooms, broken computers and a nurse for half a day, only on Fridays. We fought for more for our students and watched as our mayoral controlled school district refused to provide more funding, and instead returned with the decision to close the school. All of this was demoralizing.

These last two school years have been even tougher. Tougher for parents, for students and for educators. We’ve experienced a historic presidential election, an uprising to bring about racial justice, an attempted coup and a debate on whether schools are even a safe place to be during a pandemic. Educators were caught smack in the middle of all of this, hoping that our students and their families, as well as our own, were safe and healthy. Trying to help our students make sense of this world while we’re still figuring it out has been exhausting.

Often in education we hear that teachers are burned out, but that isn’t quite accurate. As teacher demoralization expert Doris Santoro says, “burnout tells the wrong story about the kinds of pain educators are experiencing because it suggests that the problem lies within individual teachers themselves.” Those outside education assume that the teacher can’t hack it in the classroom. But in reality, teachers are forced to operate in systems that aren’t functioning properly, which makes teachers feel demoralized, discouraged and overwhelmed. According to Santoro, demoralization occurs because teachers “care deeply about students and the profession, and they realize that school policies and conditions make it impossible for them to do what is good, right and just.”

As a 15-year educator in Chicago Public Schools, let me explain what demoralization looks like:

• Losing more students to various forms of gun violence than years I’ve been teaching, and being told educators are greedy for demanding more counselors, social workers, therapists, clinicians and psychologists for our students. Every day, as a 40-year-old, I struggle with these losses and imagine what it’s like for the 14-year-olds I teach.
• Watching 7-year-olds on a school night in February plead with school officials to not close their school.
• Watching parents and community members go on a 34 day hunger strike just to get a school open.
• Having to tape down broken asbestos tiles on our floor so the students and staff don’t breathe in a carcinogen.
• Supporting students who want to speak up and out, only to be told we are indoctrinating students who dare to challenge the status quo.
• Dealing with all these inequalities while trying to teach through a pandemic.

To survive in systems like Chicago, or anywhere really, educators eventually realize they need to control what we can, which is what happens inside our classrooms. We have kids sit in circles and talk about novels they read. We have debates about current events, we do amazing experiments and solve formulas. Students perform concerts and showcase their art. We form meaningful relationships with our students as we get to know each other over the year we spend together. We laugh with and at our students, and learn to laugh when they make fun of us.

But during all of those amazing days we also try to ignore that it’s only 60 degrees in our classroom in the dead of winter or that it’s over 90 degrees in our rooms in the summer. We try to ignore the mold in the ceiling tiles, the windows that don’t open, the blinds that broke and have not been repaired, ever, and the floors that haven’t been swept because every custodian has quit. Some days it just seems easier to work in a cubicle where at least the air conditioning works.

We try to ignore all of that so we can just teach. But no matter how hard we try we can’t help but see the inequities, the injustice, the hypocrisy in our education system.

We went from being heroes and essential workers during the spring of 2020 to being viewed as babysitters by politicians around the country. We fight for student safety and we are told to get back in the building, ironically by people working remotely. We challenge our students to question and are told we are indoctrinating them with “critical race theory.” We are plied with guilt and encouraged to normalize choosing our students over our own families and our own lives. Our love of students is regularly abused. We are pitted against each other by administrators or district heads who use terms like “super teachers” for some and “hell raisers” for others. We grow so demoralized and dispirited that some educators lose hope and motivation; they become so empty that they start to think teachers should go back to only worrying about our pay and benefits. That fighting for the common good of our students is too difficult to even think about.

All of this is intentional on the part of our school systems and those controlling them. All of this is demoralizing. We love teaching, we love students. All we want is a true say in how our schools are run.

Right now the educators may be in one of the greatest exoduses in history. Educators are leaving, and they will continue to leave in record numbers. Teachers will either leave silently or will leave fighting. We will be thanked for our service and left to rebuild our professional lives.

Some think tanks will try to replace us with some fast tracked program like Teach For America, only to watch them leave in faster time than educators who’ve been called to this profession, who are committed to honing our craft and improving year after year.

Educators know that bargaining for the common good, working with other organizations and advocacy groups who think about all parts of our students’ lives is what gives us hope. The late Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis taught us to bargain for the common good and to realize we are the experts.

We want community run schools, where the voices of parents, students, educators and administrators all matter. We want elected school boards and an end to mayoral controlled school districts. We want time to plan and to collaborate. We want equitable funding for our schools. We want to stop wasting our own time creating DonorsChoose projects to compensate for the ridiculous lack of funding our schools receive.

We want policy that actually shows that our students matter. But here’s the thing: We want to be a part of all of this work. We have the expertise, the experience, the degrees, the certifications upon certifications. We know how schools work. This is how we can attract teachers and re-energize the experts that we do have.

America’s educators aren’t burned out. We are demoralized.

The solution lies in understanding the difference.

As a teacher, I felt fortunate. The first job I took in Chicago Public Schools in 2007 was at a school where the administration truly valued student and staff input. I remember sitting with students as we interviewed potential new teachers and the students saying things like, “This teacher doesn’t seem like they will be a good fit for our school family.”

The entire school staff worked incredibly hard to give our students every opportunity possible. The issue was that our school (like many across the country) did not have the resources it needed. We watched our already thin school budget be decimated by more budget cuts. We let go of administrators, counselors, librarians and teachers.

The reduction in school staff immediately impacted the students. They lost supportive adults who had built relationships with them. The inequity in the system was tragic and profound. As educators, we would tell our students they could become anything, while simultaneously teaching them in a school building that had no soap in the bathrooms, broken computers and a nurse for half a day, only on Fridays. We fought for more for our students and watched as our mayoral controlled school district refused to provide more funding, and instead returned with the decision to close the school. All of this was demoralizing.

These last two school years have been even tougher. Tougher for parents, for students and for educators. We’ve experienced a historic presidential election, an uprising to bring about racial justice, an attempted coup and a debate on whether schools are even a safe place to be during a pandemic. Educators were caught smack in the middle of all of this, hoping that our students and their families, as well as our own, were safe and healthy. Trying to help our students make sense of this world while we’re still figuring it out has been exhausting.

Often in education we hear that teachers are burned out, but that isn’t quite accurate. As teacher demoralization expert Doris Santoro says, “burnout tells the wrong story about the kinds of pain educators are experiencing because it suggests that the problem lies within individual teachers themselves.” Those outside education assume that the teacher can’t hack it in the classroom. But in reality, teachers are forced to operate in systems that aren’t functioning properly, which makes teachers feel demoralized, discouraged and overwhelmed. According to Santoro, demoralization occurs because teachers “care deeply about students and the profession, and they realize that school policies and conditions make it impossible for them to do what is good, right and just.”

As a 15-year educator in Chicago Public Schools, let me explain what demoralization looks like:

• Losing more students to various forms of gun violence than years I’ve been teaching, and being told educators are greedy for demanding more counselors, social workers, therapists, clinicians and psychologists for our students. Every day, as a 40-year-old, I struggle with these losses and imagine what it’s like for the 14-year-olds I teach.
• Watching 7-year-olds on a school night in February plead with school officials to not close their school.
• Watching parents and community members go on a 34 day hunger strike just to get a school open.
• Having to tape down broken asbestos tiles on our floor so the students and staff don’t breathe in a carcinogen.
• Supporting students who want to speak up and out, only to be told we are indoctrinating students who dare to challenge the status quo.
• Dealing with all these inequalities while trying to teach through a pandemic.

To survive in systems like Chicago, or anywhere really, educators eventually realize they need to control what we can, which is what happens inside our classrooms. We have kids sit in circles and talk about novels they read. We have debates about current events, we do amazing experiments and solve formulas. Students perform concerts and showcase their art. We form meaningful relationships with our students as we get to know each other over the year we spend together. We laugh with and at our students, and learn to laugh when they make fun of us.

But during all of those amazing days we also try to ignore that it’s only 60 degrees in our classroom in the dead of winter or that it’s over 90 degrees in our rooms in the summer. We try to ignore the mold in the ceiling tiles, the windows that don’t open, the blinds that broke and have not been repaired, ever, and the floors that haven’t been swept because every custodian has quit. Some days it just seems easier to work in a cubicle where at least the air conditioning works.

We try to ignore all of that so we can just teach. But no matter how hard we try we can’t help but see the inequities, the injustice, the hypocrisy in our education system.

We went from being heroes and essential workers during the spring of 2020 to being viewed as babysitters by politicians around the country. We fight for student safety and we are told to get back in the building, ironically by people working remotely. We challenge our students to question and are told we are indoctrinating them with “critical race theory.” We are plied with guilt and encouraged to normalize choosing our students over our own families and our own lives. Our love of students is regularly abused. We are pitted against each other by administrators or district heads who use terms like “super teachers” for some and “hell raisers” for others. We grow so demoralized and dispirited that some educators lose hope and motivation; they become so empty that they start to think teachers should go back to only worrying about our pay and benefits. That fighting for the common good of our students is too difficult to even think about.

All of this is intentional on the part of our school systems and those controlling them. All of this is demoralizing. We love teaching, we love students. All we want is a true say in how our schools are run.

Right now the educators may be in one of the greatest exoduses in history. Educators are leaving, and they will continue to leave in record numbers. Teachers will either leave silently or will leave fighting. We will be thanked for our service and left to rebuild our professional lives.

Some think tanks will try to replace us with some fast tracked program like Teach For America, only to watch them leave in faster time than educators who’ve been called to this profession, who are committed to honing our craft and improving year after year.

Educators know that bargaining for the common good, working with other organizations and advocacy groups who think about all parts of our students’ lives is what gives us hope. The late Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis taught us to bargain for the common good and to realize we are the experts.

We want community run schools, where the voices of parents, students, educators and administrators all matter. We want elected school boards and an end to mayoral controlled school districts. We want time to plan and to collaborate. We want equitable funding for our schools. We want to stop wasting our own time creating DonorsChoose projects to compensate for the ridiculous lack of funding our schools receive.

We want policy that actually shows that our students matter. But here’s the thing: We want to be a part of all of this work. We have the expertise, the experience, the degrees, the certifications upon certifications. We know how schools work. This is how we can attract teachers and re-energize the experts that we do have.

America’s educators aren’t burned out. We are demoralized.

The solution lies in understanding the difference.

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