Types of rubrics
Rubrics can be holistic or analytic, general or task specific.
Holistic rubrics provide a single score based on an overall impression of a student’s performance on a task. The converse is an analytic rubric.
- Advantages: quick scoring provides an overview of student achievement
- Disadvantages: does not provide detailed information, may be difficult to provide one overall score
- Use when:
- you want a quick snapshot of achievement.
- a single dimension is adequate to define quality.
Analytic rubrics provide feedback along several dimensions. The converse is a holistic rubric.
- Advantages: more detailed feedback, scoring more consistent across students and graders
- Disadvantage: time consuming to score
- Use when:
- you want to see relative strengths and weaknesses.
- you want detailed feedback.
- you want to assess complicated skills or performance.
- you want students to self-assess their understanding or performance.
General rubrics contain criteria that are general across tasks. The converse is a task specific rubric.
- Advantage: can use the same rubric across different tasks
- Disadvantage: feedback may not be specific enough.
- Use when:
- you want to assess reasoning, skills, and products.
- all students are not doing exactly the same task.
Task specific rubrics are unique to a specific task. The converse is a general rubric.
- Advantage: more reliable assessment of performance
- Disadvantage: difficult to construct rubrics for all tasks.
- Use when:
- you want to assess knowledge.
- when consistency of scoring is extremely important.
Examples:
