Ten-step Process to Building Rubrics
Here is a ten-step tutorial for building rubrics.
Follow the steps as you go, and you will be creating great rubrics
in no time at all.
Collect old samples of student work for the
performance task you want to assess.
Sort the samples into piles, based on quality.
Start with two or three piles and adjust the piles as you sort, so
that you eventually end up with four, five, or six piles (depending
upon how much variation you see, and what you want your scoring
scale to be.)
Before drafting language
for the rubric, ask yourself a tough question: Is this pile of
work really the best that is possible by students of roughly
this level of experience? Or might there be far better work out
there somewhere? This is a vital issue, because you want your
rubric built backward from genuine excellence, not just local
Once you are confident that the pile of “best”
work is truly excellent, take the time to analyze what all the
various pieces have in common. How would you describe what they do
so well? What words capture what they do that the work in the other
piles does not? Make a running list of key descriptive phrases.
Group all the answers from your list of phrases
into a small number of categories, so as to identify the specific
and distinct criteria you will highlight in the rubric (e.g.
development of ideas, clarity of expression, well supported,
creative display, etc.). You can also work in the other direction:
if you are fairly clear on the criteria you want to highlight, (e.g.
thoroughness, clarity, accuracy, etc.) group your descriptions under
Use this same analysis approach with the piles
of lesser quality, working from higher to lower quality. This time,
though, you’ll start with your criteria ideas as the categories
under which you’ll jot your descriptive phrases. But you may start
to find that you have too many descriptive phrases, and that some of
the phrases are more concrete and assignment-specific than others.
The more assignment-specific phrases may work best as bulleted
indicators under a more general set of phrases.
The rubric needs to be written so that each sentence(s) at one level has its counterpart on the other levels of
the rubric, in which the same criterion is traced through the
rubric. You may find yourself running out of language as you work.
When you are struggling for words, just put placeholder language,
e.g. “Not as clear as a 4” or “Less organized than a 6”. Eventually
you will want to replace such comparative language with descriptive
language, but initially such phrasing is fine. The same is true of
value words like “Good” or “poor”. Your final rubric must say what
“good” and “poor” look like in the concrete. (Why does it need to
eventually be changed? If the end user is the student “good” and
“poor” is not very helpful as feedback! More descriptive language
will help the student know why her/his work is “good” or
Make a final decision about how many score
points and how many distinct criteria you wish to use, and develop a
blank matrix or table (in Word or Excel) based on the decision.
Fill in the matrix with the draft rubric
language. Edit the language as needed to make it maximally
descriptive and where the different descriptors have parallelism in
the criteria analyzed.
Decide how much you want to weight each
criterion in terms of percentage/point value in the overall
assessment. Some criteria are more important than others, so assign
Try out the rubric and adjust
categories/criteria as needed
(taken and adapted from Big
Ideas, Volume 1, Issue 2 -http://www.bigideas.org)
Additional source: Stevens, Dannelle and Antonia Levi.
Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time,
Convey Effective Feedback, and Promote Student Learning, Stylus
November 02, 2009