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California Foundation for History Education

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California Foundation for History Education

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Founded in 2015 by educators, the California Foundation for History Education's Inquire, Discover, Engage seeks to unleash to potential of every child to become an engaged, civically-minded community member.

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Based on the foundational pillars of critical thinking, questioning, research, and discourse, CFHE is working to ensure that all students in California have the opportunity to engage in authentic historical inquiry and civic engagement.

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Inquire Discover Engage | California Foundation For History Education

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Founded in 2015 by educators, the California Foundation for History Education's Inquire, Discover, Engage seeks to unleash to potential of every child to become an engaged, civically-minded community member. ​​​ Based on the foundational pillars of critical thinking, questioning, research, and discourse, CFHE is working to ensure that all students in California have the opportunity to engage in authentic historical inquiry and civic engagement.

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Myron Dueck: Assessment Is a Student-Teacher Partnership

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Cult of Pedagogy Higher Order Tasks/Thinking

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Cult of Pedagogy Higher Order Tasks/Thinking

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The mobiles hang from the ceiling like jewelry, filling Ms. Jackson's language arts classroom with bright, twirling colors. They make a pretty canopy over the room, and if you look closer at the individual dangly bits on each mobile, you'll see that they contain words: Alliteration, says one, and below it hang four more pieces of paper that give examples of alliteration. Personification, says another. Simile. Metaphor. Onomatopoeia. They're figurative language mobiles. Ms. Jackson's students spent two full class periods working on them, and many even took theirs home to finish them before they were put up for display.

When she wrote those two days into her lesson plans, Ms. Jackson thought she was adding higher-order thinking to her students' learning. After all, they were creating something, weren't they?

Well, yes and no. Yes, they created mobiles with wire hangers, construction paper, markers, and glue. But they didn't actually create anything with figurative language, like a piece of original writing, for example.

The mobiles, in fact, represent no higher-order thinking at all.

It's kind of a given that most teachers want their students to be doing rigorous, challenging work. Ask any teacher, "Is it your goal to simply have students regurgitate facts in your class?" and every time, the answer will probably be no.

And yet, that exact thing is happening more often than we realize.

It's not for lack of trying: For years, teachers have consulted their Bloom's flip charts and DOK wheels to choose the verbs that are meant to represent higher levels of thinking. In a lot of cases, though, while the right verbs are being used, the tasks they represent aren't actually on the level teachers think they are.

Over the years I've seen teachers make two specific mistakes with higher-order thinking tasks more often than any other, so I'm going to drill down and focus just on those two mistakes here.

Defining Our Terms

First, let's make sure we're on the same page: When people talk about higher-order thinking, what do they mean, exactly? The answer can be different depending on who you ask.

First, there's the question of which framework you're using. Bloom's Taxonomy is commonly used by teachers to classify learning outcomes, as is Webb's Depth of Knowledge framework. Other teachers prefer the SOLO Taxonomy created by John Biggs.

For the sake of efficiency, I'll stick to Bloom's for this discussion; specifically, I'll be referring to the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy, which was first published by Anderson and Krathwohl in 2001.

So if we just look at Bloom's, which levels would be seen as representing "higher-order" thinking? Logically, it would seem that any task that goes above the Remember level-where students simply recall information-would be considered "higher" because it's higher than that lowest level. But in many discussions of higher-order thinking, this label is often reserved for the three highest levels: Analyze, Evaluate, and Create.

So for now, when I say "higher order," I'll be referring to those three levels.

By the way, there is nothing inherently wrong with the lower levels; taking in information, understanding it, and applying it are all necessary and vital parts of a good education. But if our students work only at those levels day in and day out, they aren't becoming good thinkers. Without regular opportunities to pull ideas apart, evaluate texts and situations, and use what they learn to develop new ideas, they aren't going to be able to do much with the information they learn at the lower levels, especially once they're out of school.

On top of that, a course that only asks students to receive information and spit it back out is really, really boring. If we want engaged students who actually care about what they're learning, we have to ask them to do more than just regurgitate.

Two Common Mistakes

When teachers I have worked with plan learning experiences, and they want to include higher-order thinking activities, they most often tend to make two particular mistakes. Avoiding these two errors should go a long way toward making the "higher-order" label more accurate in all schools.

Mistake 1: Thinking a task is at the "Analyze" level when it's really at the "Understand" level

Because we use the word "analyze" so often in conversation, its meaning has gotten slippery. Someone could say "analyze that painting," and another person might answer by giving a basic description of the painting and offering an opinion about its meaning.

True analysis goes deeper, breaking a whole into parts and looking at how those parts impact the whole, differentiating relevant from irrelevant information, organizing ideas within a particular structure, or recognizing underlying bias, values or point of view.

"To truly analyze a painting, for example" says author and instructional coach Julie Stern, "we would require that students do one of the above, such as discussing how the use of colors, materials, or other artistic technique impact one another, or how they impact the overall meaning of the painting."

For the analysis to be legitimate, Stern adds, we also have to be careful that the situation presented is one that we have not previously taught in class. "We have to be sure that students are not merely remembering and repeating our analysis of the painting, novel, war, etc., that we studied together in class." Instead, students can demonstrate their analytical skills by analyzing a completely new painting.

Because we don't always think of analysis with this tighter definition, we sometimes think certain tasks are at the "Analyze" level, when they are actually at the "Understand" level.

It's not surprising that we make this mistake: The "Understand" level encompasses a surprising number of cognitive tasks that go well beyond simple recall of facts: Anderson & Krathwohl's revised taxonomy includes interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining within this level. Understand-level work can be rigorous and challenging; it should be a regular part of the work students do. But there are much higher levels of thinking that we can build into our classroom routines on a regular basis.

Mistake 2: Thinking a task is at the "Create" level when it's actually a "Remember" or "Understand" task with a pretty package

Teachers assign all kinds of projects that they believe hit the Create level of Bloom's: posters, dioramas, booklets, and so on. While it may appear on the surface that students are actively creating something new, in a lot of cases they are still working at a very low cognitive level, merely reassembling facts and delivering them in a pretty package.

Technology can make this problem worse: Students may be tasked with creating a video, a Prezi, or even a digital game, but if the content of the end product is little more than a rehashing of facts, that task is still at a lower level.

"Create, according to the Revised Bloom's," Stern explains, "requires students to organize elements into a pattern, structure, or product that is new, or has not previously existed. One way to think about it is that 'analysis' is breaking elements apart to discuss how the parts impact each other or the larger structure. And 'creating' is putting the elements back together in a new way or in a new situation."

So when studying animal habitats, having students build a clay model of a habitat for an animal you studied in class might feel like a creative project, but in reality, students are just making a 3-D representation of facts they already learned.

"When we ask students to 'create' a poster, brochure, video, or digital game that creatively explains the main points discussed in class," Stern says, "we are not reaching a higher level of thinking. Again, it might be helpful to think about a new context or situation, even a hypothetical one, not simply a new product. If we want students to create a habitat for an animal, it should be a different type of animal than ones we previously discussed."

Here's another way to look at it: Work at the Create level doesn't really need glue, markers, scissors, or technology to qualify as a "Create" task. If you remove all the "creative" trappings and just look at the mental work students are doing, it should still involve creating something new with the content they're learning.

Sample Lesson: Bill of Rights

Now let's take a look at these mistakes within the context of a more complete set of lesson plans, followed by another set that does a better job of building in higher-order thinking.

Tony is an 8th grade social studies teacher who is designing a set of lessons on the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. His state standards say that students should be able to do the following in regards to the Bill of Rights:

Identify and explain the rights granted to all citizens by the Bill of Rights

Identify and evaluate contemporary issues that involve the rights granted by the Bill of Rights

We'll start with Tony's original lesson plans, the ones he's used to teach the Bill of Rights for several years now. Then we'll look at another set of plans from the Bill of Rights Institute that tackles the same basic goals, but pushes students to higher levels of thinking about the material.

Time frames are based on class periods of about 45-60 minutes.

Bill of Rights Lesson Plan: BEFORE

(Duration: 1 week)

This activity is at the Remember level of Bloom's: Students are simply taking in the information and recording it.

Tony believes this activity is at the Create level, because students are creating their own websites, but because they're just defining the amendment, giving examples, and linking to other examples without commentary, the work never rises above the Understand level. Unfortunately, because students are learning new technology in order to do this project, it takes most of the week to complete, which makes it a strong candidate for the Grecian Urn label: a task that consumes far more time than it gives back in terms of learning.

While most of this test is at the Remember level, Tony believes the final question is at the Analyze level, because students are "analyzing" the relationship between the Bill of Rights and their own lives. In fact, they are really just giving examples of the rights in their own lives, and exemplifying is at the Understand level.

Bill of Rights Lesson Plan: AFTER

(Duration: 1 week)

This revised version contains more higher-order thinking. It comes from the Bill of Rights lesson plan offered free as part of the Being an American series offered by the Bill of Rights Institute. Although the original plan says it's for a single day, it relies heavily on homework to make that happen. Moving the homework activities into class time would make this about a 1-week set of lessons.

This task is at the Understand level, because students are interpreting the rights into their own language. Again, some lower-level thinking is going to be a part of any learning cycle, so this set of plans will also include some activities in the lower levels. With that said, work at the Understand level is still more cognitively complex than the Remember level: This activity does push students to do more than simply copy down the information.

This is at the Evaluate level, because students are making judgments about the relative importance of the amendments.

This activity is at the Understand level, because students are being asked to classify each scenario as an example of a specific right.

4: The Bill of Rights Today (1 class period)Students must locate five current news stories related to the Bill of Rights. For each one, they will need to summarize the story, identify which amendment is related to the story, and discuss how the issue might touch their own lives. 5: "Life Without..." Stories (1-2 class periods)After reading a short story, "Life Without Rights for the Accused," which illustrates life in a society where government does not honor the criminal procedure protections in the Bill of Rights, students write their own stories about what life would be like if citizens didn't have one particular right.
Although this activity is similar to the one before it, having students classify stories by the most relevant amendment, this task is a bit more complex because the scenarios here are not pre-screened for them: Students will have to find their own articles and dig through irrelevant details to determine which amendment is most clearly illustrated in the articles. That kind of work takes this activity closer to the Analysis level.

This is at the Create level. Students are using their knowledge of our current rights and how they play out in everyday life to imagine a different society where those rights are not present.

Even though both sets of plans take about the same amount of time to teach, the "After" set gives students many more opportunities to engage deeply with the content, and students in that classroom are more likely to finish the week with an enduring, transferable understanding of their constitutional rights. If you were walking past both classrooms, it might look like the kids making their own websites are doing more engaging, 21st-century work, but cognitively, those websites don't demand much from students at all.
What do I want students to be able to do with this knowledge once the lesson is over?
Beyond the Levels, Beyond the Verbs

When we are striving to develop deeper, more rigorous learning experiences for our students, it's easy to get bogged down in trying to figure out exactly which level a task fits into or which verb is the most accurate. If you find yourself spending way too long on the labeling aspect of planning, it's time to stop and refocus on a different question...

In other words, why are they learning this stuff, how do I want them to transfer that learning to real life, and how can I replicate those uses in a classroom activity?

Let's consider the Bill of Rights. We want our citizens to understand their rights so that when their rights or the rights of people they know are violated, they'll recognize it and be able to take action. This is one of the ways we participate in a democratic society, right? So an activity where students look at sample situations and identify which rights are being infringed upon is one way to have them transfer their knowledge of the Bill of Rights into new situations, cases that might be similar to things they may experience themselves. Finding more articles from current publications can extend that learning even further.

And what about the Create task in the "After" lesson? What is the value of having students write a story about life without one of the freedoms granted by the Bill of Rights? This kind of activity deepens their understanding of their rights. Rather than simply recopying the same information into a new package, they are being asked to actively imagine a different life from the one they're living, with one significant right removed from it. That kind of exercise gets them to think more about how these rights actually impact their day-to-day lives, which is a far more complex task than recalling the list of rights from what they were taught.

The "After" lesson presented here is just one example of how to build more higher-order thinking into students' learning experiences. It can be done in lots of ways, and the goal isn't to always hit every level; instead, choose activities that will get students working with the material in ways that will serve them later in life.

The next time Ms. Jackson teaches figurative language, she can skip the wire hangers and just have students use figurative language in their own personal narratives, poems, or essays. The writing won't necessarily make the classroom any prettier, but for the rest of their lives, those kids may be more likely to use better metaphors, personification, and alliteration to make their writing more powerful: college essays, professional presentations, even love letters.

Which is kind of the point, isn't it? ♦

Come back for more.
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Is That Higher-Order Task Really Higher Order?

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Ask any group of teachers if their goal is to simply have students regurgitate facts, and every one of them will say no. Despite that, it keeps happening.

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you just don't know their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.
So let's talk about rubrics for a few minutes. What we're going to do here is describe two frequently used kinds of rubrics, holistic and analytic, plus a less common one called the single-point rubric (my favorite, for the record). For each one, we'll look at an example and explore its pros and cons.

Off we go!

A holistic rubric is the most general kind. It lists three to five levels of performance, along with a broad description of the characteristics that define each level. The levels can be labeled with numbers (such as 1 through 4), letters (such as A through F) or words (such as Beginning through Exemplary). What each level is called isn't what makes the rubric holistic - it's the way the characteristics are all lumped together.

Suppose you're an unusually demanding person. You want your loved ones to know what you expect if they should ever make you breakfast in bed. So you give them this holistic rubric:

When your breakfast is done, you simply gather your loved ones and say, "I'm sorry my darlings, but that breakfast was just a 2. Try harder next time."

The main advantage of a holistic rubric is that it's easy on the teacher - in the short run, anyway. Creating a holistic rubric takes less time than the others, and grading with one is faster, too. You just look over an assignment and give one holistic score to the whole thing.

The main disadvantage of a holistic rubric is that it doesn't provide targeted feedback to students, which means they're unlikely to learn much from the assignment. Although many holistic rubrics list specific characteristics for each level, the teacher gives only one score, without breaking it down into separate qualities. This often leads the student to approach the teacher and ask, "Why did you give me a 2?" If the teacher is the explaining kind, he will spend a few minutes breaking down the score. If not, he'll say something like, "Read the rubric." Then the student has to guess which factors had the biggest influence on her score. For a student who really tries hard, it can be heartbreaking to have no idea what she's doing wrong.

Holistic rubrics are most useful in cases when there's no time (or need, though that's hard to imagine) for specific feedback. You see them in standardized testing - the essay portion of the SAT is scored with a 0-6 holistic rubric. When hundreds of thousands of essays have to be graded quickly, and by total strangers who have no time to provide feedback, a holistic rubric comes in handy.

An analytic rubric breaks down the characteristics of an assignment into parts, allowing the scorer to itemize and define exactly what aspects are strong, and which ones need improvement.

So for the breakfast in bed example, an analytic rubric would look like this:

In this case, you'd give your loved ones a separate score for each category. They might get a 3 on Presentation, but a 2 on Food and just a 1 on Comfort. To make feedback even more targeted, you could also highlight specific phrases in the rubric, like, "the recipient is crowded during the meal" to indicate exactly what went wrong.

This is where we see the main advantage of the analytic rubric: It gives students a clearer picture of why they got the score they got. It is also good for the teacher, because it gives her the ability to justify a score on paper, without having to explain everything in a later conversation.

Analytic rubrics have two significant disadvantages, however: (1) Creating them takes a lot of time. Writing up descriptors of satisfactory work - completing the "3" column in this rubric, for example - is enough of a challenge on its own. But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a big, big task. And once all that work is done, (2) students won't necessarily read the whole thing. Facing a 36-cell table crammed with 8-point font is enough to send most students straight into a nap. And that means they won't clearly understand what's expected of them.

Still, analytic rubrics are useful when you want to cover all your bases, and you're willing to put in the time to really get clear on exactly what every level of performance looks like.

A single-point rubric is a lot like an analytic rubric, because it breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria. What makes it different is that it only describes the criteria for proficiency; it does not attempt to list all the ways a student could fall short, nor does it specify how a student could exceed expectations.

A single-point rubric for breakfast in bed would look like this:

Notice that the language in the "Criteria" column is exactly the same as the "3" column in the analytic rubric. When your loved ones receive this rubric, it will include your written comments on one or both sides of each category, telling them exactly how they fell short ("runny eggs," for example) and how they excelled ("vase of flowers"). Just like with the analytic rubric, if a target was simply met, you can just highlight the appropriate phrase in the center column.

If you've never used a single-point rubric, it's worth a try. In 2010, Jarene Fluckiger studied a collection of teacher action research studies on the use of single-point rubrics. She found that student achievement increased with the use of these rubrics, especially when students helped create them and used them to self-assess their work.

The single-point rubric has several advantages: (1) It contains far less language than the analytic rubric, which means students are more likely to read it and it will take less time to create, while still providing rich detail about what's expected. (2) Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended. When using full analytic rubrics, I often find that students do things that are not described on the rubric, but still depart from expectations. Because I can't find the right language to highlight, I find myself hand-writing justifications for a score in whatever space I can find. This is frustrating, time-consuming and messy. With a single-point rubric, there's no attempt to predict all the ways a student might go wrong. Similarly, the undefined "Advanced" column places no limits on how students might stretch themselves. "If the highest level is already prescribed then creativity may be limited to that pre-determined level," says Fluckiger. "Students may surprise us if we leave quality open-ended."

The main disadvantage of single-point rubrics is that using them requires more writing on the teacher's part. If a student has fallen short in many areas, completing that left-hand column will take more time than simply highlighting a pre-written analytic rubric.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Sources:

Fluckiger, J. (2010). Single point rubric: A tool for responsible student self-assessment. Teacher Education Faculty Publications. Paper 5. Retrieved April 25, 2014 from http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/tedfacpub/5.

Mertler, C. A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(25). Retrieved April 30, 2014 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25.
Know Your Terms is my effort to build a user-friendly knowledge base of terms every educator should know. New items will be added on an ongoing basis. If you heard some term at a PD and didn't want to admit you didn't know what it meant, send it to me via the contact form and I'll research it for you.

Keep in touch.
Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!

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Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you've used them for years without knowing their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.

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Best Practices for Designing Effective Rubrics (ASU)

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Best Practices for Designing Effective Rubrics (ASU)

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By Philip Arcuria & Maryrose Chaaban
Rubrics: A Definition
Rubrics have become a highly touted and ubiquitous tool in the proverbial assessment toolbox of higher education instructors. Rubrics can provide a wide range of benefits, from providing consistent feedback to students to decreasing overall grading time.

So, what is a rubric? Formally defined, a rubric is a "...coherent set of criteria for students' work that includes descriptions of levels of performance quality on the criteria" (Brookhart, 2013, p. 4). In short, rubrics distinguish between levels of student performance on a given activity.

More broadly, a rubric is an evaluation tool that has three distinguishing features: evaluative criteria, quality definitions, and a scoring strategy (Popham, 2000).

Evaluative criteria represent the dimensions on which a student activity or artifact (e.g., an assignment) is evaluated.

Quality definitions comprise qualitative descriptions that distinguish student performance across a continuum for a given criterion.

The scoring strategy articulates the process of converting the qualitative evaluations of student performance related to each criterion into an overall judgement of the quality of the artifact.

Benefits of a Rubric

Rubrics can be used to provide objective, meaningful, and substantive feedback on a variety of assignments including papers, presentations, discussions, and projects. A carefully designed rubric can provide benefits to instructors and students alike.

Rubrics can help instructors:

reduce the amount of time spent grading

ensure consistency and objectivity in grading

reduce uncertainty and complaints about grades

adjust instruction or provide additional resources based on the overall performance of an entire class

Rubrics can also help students:

understand an instructor's expectations on an assignment

understand how the assignment aligns to the course objectives

improve their performance by integrating instructor feedback

evaluate their own work

Getting Started with Designing a Rubric

There are two main types of rubrics instructors can design: holistic rubrics and analytic rubrics. Holistic rubrics provide one overall score and do not provide students with feedback on how they performed on each individual assignment criterion. Conversely, analytic rubrics provide students with a score on each criterion. This article focuses on analytic rubrics, which tend to be preferable for formative assessments given they provide students with specific guidance and feedback related to each relevant criterion (Brookhart, 2013).

Analytic rubrics can be broken down into three parts:

1. Performance criteria are the factors being measured (e.g., Organization of Essay, Thesis Statement, etc.) and are commonly represented as the rows of a rubric.

2. Performance levels represent gradations of performance and typically take the form of the column headings of a rubric. The performance labels can be numeric (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4) or textual (e.g., Poor, Acceptable, Good, Excellent).

3. Performance level descriptors articulate observable characteristics of performance for the intersection of a given criteria and performance level and comprise the cells of a rubric.

Best Practices when Designing Rubric

One of the first steps in designing a quality rubric is to identify the skills and knowledge students should demonstrate in the assignment based on the overall course or module learning objectives.

Building off of the recommendations of van Leusen (2013), you can use the following questions to get started:

What knowledge and skills is the assignment designed to assess? (Learning Objective)

What observable criteria represent those knowledge and skills? (Performance Criteria)

How can you best divide those criteria to represent distinct and meaningful levels of student performance? (Performance Levels)

What observable characteristics of students' work differentiate among the performance levels for each criterion? (Performance Level Descriptors)

Addressing these questions can go a long way in helping you pinpoint the criteria you should include in a high-quality rubric. Once you have identified your criteria, you can start designing your rubric. Generally speaking, a high-quality analytic rubric should:

1. Consist of 3-5 performance levels (Popham, 2000; Suskie, 2009).

2. Include two or more performance criteria, and the labels for the criteria should be distinct, clear, and meaningful (Brookhart, 2013; Nitko & Brookhart, 2007; Popham, 2000; Suskie, 2009).

3. Include performance level descriptors that: distinguish between qualitative differences in performance that are observable and measurable; are consistent within each criterion; and clearly articulate the expectations for each performance level (Banta & Palomba, 2015; Brookhart, 2013; Nitko & Brookhart, 2007; Popham, 2000; Suskie, 2009).

Evaluating Your Rubric

Once you have created a rubric, you can use the following checklist to evaluate its level of quality. This checklist is based on research by the ASU EdPlus Action Lab, where it is used for automated scoring of rubrics to assess basic structure.

Performance Levels (columns)

The labels/descriptions of the performance levels are distinct, clear and meaningful

The labels/ descriptions of the performance criteria are distinct, clear and meaningful

Click the following link to download the checklist: Analytic Rubric Checklist

Examples of Exemplary Rubrics

The Association of American Colleges and Universities created a series of high-quality rubrics entitled VALUE rubrics that span intellectual and practical skills (i.e. critical thinking, written communication, teamwork), personal and social responsibility (i.e. civic engagement, global learning, and ethical reasoning), and integrative learning.

These rubrics are open source and available to download directly from their website. To view these rubrics, please visit the Association of American Colleges and Universities - VALUE Rubrics.

Additional Resources

Here is a list of additional resources regarding rubrics:

References

Arcuria, P., Morgan, W., & Fikes, T. G. (2019). Validating the use of LMS-derived rubric structural features to facilitate automated measurement of rubric quality. International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge.

Banta, T. W., & Palomba, C. A. (2015). Assessment essentials: planning, implementing, and improving assessment in higher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brookhart, Susan M. (2013). How to create and use rubrics for formative assessment and grading. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.

Nitko, A. J., & Brookhart, S. M. (2007). Educational Assessment of Students (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Popham, W. J. (2000). Modern educational measurement: Practical guidelines for educational leaders (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Suskie, L. (2009). Assessing student learning: A common sense guide (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

van Leusen, P. (2013). Assessments with rubrics. ASU TeachOnline. Retreived from https://teachonline.asu.edu/2013/08/assessments-with-rubrics/

About the Action Lab

The Action Lab, a dedicated digital teaching and learning laboratory within EdPlus, engages in deep learning analytics, leveraging expertise in learning, cognitive, social, and data sciences to provide continuous program improvement that drives student success. Our mission is to make technology- enabled education research useful for systemic, scalable and radical advancement in digital teaching and learning.

Special Thanks

We would like to thank Tom Fikes, Director of Research, EdPlus Action Lab, and Julie Allen, Sr. Instructional Designer, EdPlus Instructional Design & New Media for their editing prowess.

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Best Practices for Designing Effective Rubrics - Teach Online

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By Philip Arcuria & Maryrose Chaaban Rubrics: A Definition Rubrics have become a highly touted and ubiquitous tool in the proverbial assessment toolbox of higher education instructors. Rubrics can provide a wide range of benefits, from providing consistent feedback to students to decreasing overall grading time. So, what is a rubric?

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Gerry explains his marking strategy on Mr. D