This post is the follow-up to the one called Top-Down Rubric Design where I explained that there are two approaches to effective rubric design. The top-down approach is recommended when a teacher or a school has a curriculum framework for the specific content area that serves as a roadmap for each academic year. This could be state standards or national standards. In this post I will describe what the bottom-up rubric design looks like and when it is recommended to use.
The bottom-up rubric design approach is used in situations when we don’t have a curriculum framework, when we are still defining descriptions of performance mastery, or when we want to involve our students in the creation of a rubric. In all of these situations teachers probably have samples of student work to start with. This will be the basis for creating a framework for the assessment (Brookhart, 2013). Here is the step-by-step approach that will guide you:
Step 1 Sort Student Work
Gather 10-12 samples of student work relating to a particular task and sort them into three categories based on their quality: low, medium, and high (Brookhart, 2013). If you ask the students to do the sorting, they need to be familiar with the concepts and skills associated with the task otherwise their sorting might be superficial. They might only pay attention to things like neatness or formatting and not the level of knowledge and skill-use that went into the task (Brookhart, 2013).
Step 2 Describe Each Category
In this step it is very important that you, or your students, write descriptions for the low, medium, and high quality categories that are very specific. You, or your students, must describe what was done in the task and why. For example: unnecessary information was used, or the problem was approached as an area problem when it was volume problem (Brookhart, 2013). I suggest you, or your students jot down these descriptions on a large poster paper or a large Post-it. This will help in the next step!
Step 3 Compare and Contrast Category Descriptions
Now you, or your students, need to compare and contrast the descriptions. If you used the large poster paper or Post-it and you are involving your student, this is a great kinesthetic activity! Your students will be very motivated to do it! (And I write this based on many years of teaching!)
Step 4 Extract Criteria from Category Descriptions
The compare and contrast step will reveal some criteria or dimensions that you, or your students can use to start drafting a description for each of the categories (low, medium, and high). Here you may decide to keep the three categories from your sorting, but you may decide to expand into four or five categories. The choice is yours. I recommend letting this entire process unfold organically!
After Step 4, continue with the steps outlined in How to Start Creating a Rubric. Be sure to also check out the Tips for Rubric Design post for additional suggestions!
Our rubric design professional development workshop will help your faculty with step-by-step rubric design or rubric revision!
Source:
Brookhart, S. M. (2013). How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading. Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).