Considerations for Designing a High-Quality Rubric

So how does one go about designing a high-quality rubric? The most important piece of all is the description of success and the clarity of that description. What are you assessing? Reasonably, an assessment can address up to five targets (unless it's an interdisciplinary assessment with multiple teachers). These targets need to address the following three areas:

  • What academic standard, or piece of a standard, will you be assessing?
  • Which Success Criteria you will be assessing?
  • Is the expected level of rigor also clearly articulated to learners? 

Your targets will be drafted in a way that integrates all three of these areas into each statement.  If you've written a description of success that feels strong to you know that it will change after you use the rubric the first time. We've never met a rubric that hasn't been improved by its first implementation.

Below is a guide for designing rubrics that aligns to the design elements for performance assessment.  As you get started, it will be helpful for you to have open the Rubric Design Tool and your Performance Assessment Planner document from Module 4. This process is by no means simple, and we encourage you to take this on in collaboration with others.  If you would like to see this process in action, we invite you to watch the Performance Assessment PLC Rubric Teach-in from Fall 2020 and/or the Rubric Teach-in from Fall 2021.