Best Practices Page 3
Creating Rubrics for
Assessments: Web Tools for Creating Rubrics and Resources Rubrics are an excellent assessment tool to use in your classroom. Rubrics provide criteria to evaluate a student’s performance; specific levels of performance are described along with a rating scale. Teachers and students use rubrics to assess all aspects of a project or assignment. Teachers usually give students the rubric at the beginning of the assignment so that students clearly understand the expectations, know what they need to accomplish and how their work will be evaluated. Students should use the rubric as a tool to help them throughout the assignment; teachers should scaffold activities to help students use the rubric as a self-reflection tool during the time frame allotted for the assignment. Rubrics can be created for any content area. Rubrics describe the actual process of learning and clearly describe how student work will be evaluated. The descriptors in a rubric clearly communicate the specific details of what constitutes excellence in terms of content and performance standards throughout the assignment or project and provide a clear teaching directive. The use of rubrics provides an objective basis for assigning grades. Teachers and students can design rubrics; the Internet has numerous sites that provide tools for designing rubrics. In addition, there are websites with examples of rubrics that have been created by other teachers that can be modified to work with your grade level or content area. If you are new to rubrics or have been using them for years, this article shares some of the best rubric resources on the Internet.
Rubistar – this is my favorite and one of the best known
rubric creation sites on the web. Rubistar is a free tool to
help you develop rubrics
without
starting from scratch. Rubistar allows you
to use rubrics that have been created on a variety of topics
including 6 Traits of Writing, science labs, time lines,
newspapers, brochures, science fair projects, oral
presentations, music and art projects, research projects and so
much more. In addition, you can modify the wording in any of the
rubrics to meet the needs of your students.
RubiStar can
also analyze data for an entire class to determine problem
areas, and teachers can return and edit their rubrics at any
time. How to Create a Rubric from Scratch
– this site provides information about how to create a rubric
from scratch. This is a perfect site to use when you can’t find
a template or rubric that meets your needs and you’d like to know
the process for creating a quality rubric. Kathy Schrock’s Assessment and Rubric
Information – Kathy Schrock is an amazing Media Specialist
with an outstanding website. On this assessment page, she
provides links to examples of rubrics on a variety of subjects,
rubric creation websites, articles about rubrics and much more.
This is a wonderful resource. Project Centre@2Learn.ca: Project Basics
– this site provides a planning worksheet for creating
rubrics and a link to a tool to create rubrics. Creating a Rubric Tutorial – provides information about what rubrics are, why you want to use them and how to create them. http://itt.usf.edu/resources/Rubric_Tutorial_v2/default.htm#what In addition to these sites, you can visit the Amphitheater School District page at www.amphi.com and click on the Search Button (near the top of the page, it appears in white lettering). You will be taken to a web page that searches all of the web pages on the Amphitheater server. Type in the word rubric in the search engine and click Google search and you will see thousands of links with examples and information about rubrics created by teachers in our district. You could also go to your favorite search engine and type in a project you are doing followed by the word rubric and see if anyone else has already created a rubric for that topic. For example, I typed in “writing rubric” and received 197,000 results. You should be able to get some great ideas to use in creating your own rubrics from these examples. Good luck as you use rubrics as an effective assessment tool in your classroom. |
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