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Teaching Evaluation Skills with Rubrics

By Michelle Demel, Instructional Designer

Have you ever gotten stuck writing a rubric? Because rubrics take qualitative responses and convert them to quantitative scores, it can start to feel like the assignment is being reduced to a checklist. We worry that students will get hung up on the particulars of their grade rather than tackling the project the way we'd like them to.

One way to inject meaning back into the process of developing a rubric is to involve students and treat it as an exercise for teaching them evaluation skills. Using Blackboard's two-dimensional rubric to illustrate, invite students to identify evaluation criteria for an assignment or project. Give them examples of different levels of work, and then ask them to articulate the levels of achievement for the identified criteria.

Involving students in a discussion about an assignment's rubric can have a variety of benefits. It can make you aware of gaps in student understanding, allowing you to address them before they attempt the assignment. At the same time, it gives advanced students an opportunity to use what they know to flex their evaluative muscles and thus engage more fully with the material. And it will help students understand the limits of a rubric and where individualized feedback is still critical for getting the full picture.

When guiding student discussion about a rubric, keep the following points in mind:

• Remember to talk about what you look for that constitutes success, not just what can go wrong--let this inform what you write in the levels of achievement for each category.
• Think about how a rubric can apply to more than one project in the course, if applicable.
• Talk about how criteria might stay the same from project to project, but how the weight given those categories can change, depending on the particular skill you may want to emphasize at that point in time.
• Use Bloom's taxonomy to help you and your students articulate different levels of achievement.

Although Blackboard's rubrics can be used without making them visible to your students, discussing them with your students can help demystify the evaluation process and lead to better-informed student responses to your assignments.

Ultimately, we want students to realize that even with a rubric in place, the evaluative decisions are still being made by a person using experience and professional judgment—the rubric is just a tool, useful for organizing thoughts and reactions in a critical manner. Most of our students won't go on to be university professors, but many of them will take on workplace responsibilities that require them to put in place a system of evaluation. Bringing them into the rubric-building process now may be an invaluable learning experience for them later.

If you need help setting up a Blackboard rubric, the instructional designers at TTU eLearning are here to help. We can help you work through the design of a rubric, including articulating levels of achievement. We can be a sounding board before you take this conversation to your students.

For more information about Blackboard rubrics, visit TTU Blackboard Support or go directly to the Blackboard video on creating rubrics.