What deserves a rubric?
Designed with the goal of communicating expectations, Quality Rubrics take time to write, requiring student input, the use of anchors and exemplars, and most likely, multiple drafts. Tasks that deserve a rubric are typically complete processes, performances and products that are common outside of school. These include debates, oral presentations, posters, book reviews or critiques, or authentic tasks like planting a garden, making a movie, or solving a problem. Examples of rubrics
Meanwhile, checklists are perfectly useful and reasonable tools for scoring and communicating our expectations for partial products, skills, and knowledge tasks that are used primarily in classrooms. These include sentences, answers to short essay questions, or solving a math problem in a particular way. You can also use them to support rubrics by helping students “check” the different rubric requirements as they complete them. Examples of checklists
Finally, use a single or multiple point systems for items that can only be right or wrong, such as computation problems or spelling words. Examples of a point system
Checklist versus Rubric versus Point System
Deciding when to use a checklist versus when to use a rubric depends on your purpose and learning goals for your students. In general, checklists are helpful when you are looking for something specific. If you want them to use 3 vocabulary words, then create a checklist that lays out that expectation. Want them to use 3-5 sources when researching? Then put that on your checklist. A rubric is best when students will have opportunity to revise, to get feedback, and the task is meaningful enough to warrant the time it takes to and most importantly, when you are more interested in quality than you are in quantity. The questions at the bottom of this page provides more examples of what types of tasks are a best fit for quality rubrics.
If it looks like a duck….
Understanding the attributes of a quality rubric and when to use them makes it easier to recognize that just because something is labeled as a rubric doesn’t mean it is a quality rubric. Like many things in education, definitions of a term may vary depending on our own experiences: from which experts or professionals we consult or trust to how administrators ask us to present information. Many examples available from the internet label documents as rubrics seemingly because they are set up with rows and columns. Below are some examples of different scoring or feedback forms that are labeled as rubrics but are in fact, something else.
Example of a checklist that looks like a rubric
Example of a scoring sheet that looks like a rubric
Example of a Likert Scale that looks like a rubric
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