What is a Scoring Rubric?

I have found scoring rubrics to be very helpful for me as a parent of children in school, as an employee, and as a student myself.

The time spent on establishing a scoring rubric is time well spent. There is nothing more frustrating than getting a score on an assignment and not knowing exactly where you need to improve.

I believe that it is also helpful for teachers when it comes to grading. They have an established guideline in helping them to analyze the assignment and give good feedback to the student.

It is also helpful in the workplace to know where you need to improve. You don’t have to guess where the problem is and you have a better idea of what goals to set for improvement.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, the teachers got together to make rubrics for each area taught in kindergarten. It was very clear and simple, yet specific enough about what the student was expected to learn by the end of the year and what they actually could do at year's end.

It was very easy for parents to understand. For example, some of the expectations for the writing rubrics were: writing a 4-5 word sentence, focusing on an idea, placing spaces between words, and beginning sentences with a capital letter and using an end mark. Then there are three other sets of expectations for the lower performing.

One of my friends, who teaches science in high school, uses rubrics to assign projects to her students. For the last couple of years, she has put together rubrics to evaluate her student's performance on major projects.

She actually meets individually with each student, and they decide together what particular project the student will do. Then she writes rubrics about what she expects, giving several steps they must follow.

The students really like this kind of assignment, because they know what's expected of them and how it is to be organized.