Digest #180: Marking Rubrics in Education
Cover image by Tara Winstead from Pexels
By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel
Marking rubrics for assessments can be a powerful tool to set marking expectations and criteria for an assessment and support students in understanding the feedback they receive. Rubrics are most effective if introduced to students from the start and integrated in activities focused on the assessment. I have been using rubrics for my marking for many years. I feel that they also help to keep marking more consistent when several markers are involved in marking the same assessment. For this digest, I have collated some resources that can facilitate the implementation of rubrics in your teaching.
1. Creating Effective Rubrics by Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Alberta, Canada
In this short video, a short overview of rubrics is given. What are they? What should they entail? When and how to share them with students? And the research-informed benefits of using rubrics.
2. Assessment Rubrics by The University of Edinburgh, UK
In this resource different examples of holistic versus analytical rubrics are given with a particular focus on reflective assessments. Reflection pieces can be challenging to mark because of their emphasis on personal experiences. However, in this resource clear objective criteria are suggested that can facilitate the marking process.
3. Rubrics at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience by Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel, Courtney Taylor Browne Luka, & Rebecca Lai, University of Glasgow, UK
Concrete rubric templates for different assessments used in Psychology are provided in this resource. You will find rubrics for research reports (quantitative and qualitative), case studies, and essays. A self-assessment activity for students is linked for one of the research report rubrics. In addition, there are step-by-step instructions on how to use gen AI to co-create a rubric from scratch. In the final section of this resource there are instructions on how to implement rubrics into TurnItIn or Moodle.
Image by RDNE Stock project from Pexels
4. Creating a marking rubric (using ChatGPT) by the King’s Academy, King’s College London, UK
This video demonstrates how to use ChatGPT/Google Bard to co-create marking rubrics. You can play around with the prompt and see if you can make it work for your assessments. When using gen AI to create marking rubrics, you will need to tweak the output and request gen AI to fine-tune the rubric. I would also suggest being transparent with students what tools were used in the creation of rubrics (see resource 3 for an example).
5. Rubrics in higher education: An exploration of undergraduate students’ understanding and perspectives by Benjamin Taylor, Flora Kisby, and Alice Reedy in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
We usually do not share full research articles as part of our digests, but this one is a short, open access one that is written in an accessible way. It is a study that captured the students’ views on marking rubrics. The authors conducted 14 interviews and captured four themes from them that can help implementing rubrics in education. The themes were: being introduced to rubrics; language, format and presentation of the rubrics; engagement with rubrics during their modules; and role of rubrics in how their work is assessed. Taking the student voice into consideration is an important aspect towards an effective rubric implementation.
From time to time, we pick a theme and provide a curated list of links. If you have a theme suggestion, please don’t hesitate to contact us! Occasionally we publish a guest digest, and If you'd like to propose a guest digest click here. Our 5 most recent digests can be found here:
Digest #175: Authentic Assessments
Digest #176: For When You’re Feeling the Pressure!
Digest #177: Podcast Episodes for Parents and Educators
