Rubrics Don’t Need to Be Recipes

The principles of solid course design are not a secret, and they’re not new. Great lessons and great courses work to bridge the gap between what students know and what they need to know. They begin with clearly articulated student learning outcomes. Then, they involve activities that provide students with practice related to those outcomes and assessments to determine whether they have achieved those outcomes. These activities and assessments may lead to feedback and grades, and so a good course design pairs activities and assessments with clear rubrics that relate student performance to the feedback and grade.

I was talking with some of the best teachers on our campus recently and was discussing efforts by our Academic Affairs team to improve course designs by strengthening these elements, and one of the people at the presentation expressed reservations about rubrics. This individual was concerned that having a rubric ultimately created a recipe for students to do assignments that took their own thinking out of it.

I am sympathetic to this criticism, but I believe that it is more of a question about how rubrics are created than it is about the concept of a rubric. Rubrics don't need to be recipes that give away answers to students; they are powerful tools for providing students with evidence of their knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

There is always a rubric

It is crucial to recognize that faculty providing feedback to students always have a rubric in mind. That is, we have a set of standards that enable us to decide which elements of an assignment or assessment provide crucial evidence of the learning outcomes we care about so that we can provide students with clear feedback about how their learning is progressing. 

When a faculty member doesn’t have an explicit rubric, then there is a real danger that different criteria will be applied to different students’ assignments, which will lead to uneven grading. It is also valuable to share information about the rubric with students so that they recognize the relationship between the assignment and the core elements they are learning in a class. Understanding how to communicate about the rubric with students depends on the purpose of the assignment or exam. Let’s dig into that a bit more.

Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes

One reason why rubrics can feel like they stifle creativity is that they are often biased toward a subset of the key learning outcomes for a class. There are three broad classes of learning outcomes: knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Roughly speaking, knowledge is the stuff you know, skills are the things you can do, and attitudes are your orientation toward your knowledge and skills.

Often, rubrics are biased toward knowledge and skill outcomes. As a result, when a rubric is provided to students prior to the assignment, it can feel like a step-by-step guide about how to do a project that does not place much responsibility on the student to guide the process. 

Attitude outcomes often have rubrics that are less specific about what students need to do. For example, suppose a core learning outcome in your class is that you want students to be skeptical of the results of studies. You might have an assignment that requires students to develop three alternative explanations for a pattern of findings. The student still has a lot to do for themselves here, but you are letting them know that you expect them to work to find alternatives as part of that assignment. 

One reason why developing rubrics is valuable is because it helps us clarify what counts as evidence for a particular learning outcome. We talk about wanting students to be critical thinkers, effective communicators, and good leaders, but it is hard to teach these orientations without more clarity about what these outcomes entail and what would count as evidence that these outcomes have been achieved. 

Scaffolding lessons and rubrics

Of course, even with attitude outcomes, a rubric can come to feel like a recipe. To push the example of being skeptical further, you may start with clear component steps for the skill of developing alternative explanations. Early on, you might need to help students to create an alternative explanation, and so initial assignments might break that process down into steps where you want evidence from the student for all of those steps.

As the students gain proficiency in developing alternative explanations, you might expect them to generate several in an assignment without leading them through the steps. You go through this same process for teaching other techniques for being skeptical like seeking disconfirming evidence or digging into the methods of a study to determine whether the researchers have measured what they intended to.

When you communicate rubrics to students, the scaffolding of lessons can also lead to the creation of more abstract rubrics given to students over time. Initially, you might want them to execute the steps of a particular technique clearly and so you will use the rubric to communicate that these steps are the core of an assignment. Later, you might communicate that they need to perform the technique, but leave out a statement of the component steps. By the end of the class, you might ask them to write a report that includes a skeptical stance toward research findings without specifying any particular technique. Indeed, by the end of a program of study, you might expect that students can be skeptical without any prompts at all.

But a good course and a good curriculum is not a mystery novel. As instructors, we need to be as clear as possible about what we’re teaching, why we’re teaching it, and what we think successful performance looks like. We can gradually remove that scaffolding and ask students to take responsibility for performing complex processes with little guidance. We can even have rubrics that communicate that expectation. But we make it harder for students to achieve the core goals of a college education when we require them both to learn the knowledge, skills, and attitudes we aim to teach and also require them to figure out the structure of the curriculum for themselves.