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Rubric Development Tools - from JDentalEd Article

Link to Original Article:
http://www.jdentaled.org/content/75/9/1163

Technology Resources for Rubric Development
A large number of electronic resources are available to assist with rubric development, a few of which will be mentioned here. Many are targeted for the elementary or secondary level (K–12), but they can easily be adapted to higher education. These resources tend to fall into two categories: 1) relatively simple rubric templates with reminders and prompts, in which the user picks a format and fills in the blanks, for either online or printed use; and 2) rubric-builders that are online and may be embedded within a testing program to allow item banking in a database and tracking of student responses.

RubiStar (rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php) is a good example of the first category. It is a free service, originally funded by a grant from the Department of Education, and it offers a set of ready-made online templates for a wide variety of subjects (e.g., science lab reports, writing an essay, making a presentation). After selecting a template, the user can either select scales and dimensions from a drop-down menu or type them into the grid along with their descriptions. The site also provides support material, such as a tutorial and guides for creating quality rubrics.

Teachnology, Inc. (teachnology.com/web_tools/rubrics/) is also a free site designed for elementary to high school levels. The developers have gathered and made available a great deal of information regarding rubrics and tool construction. This site serves as more of a clearinghouse, providing links to other rubric sites and educational resources.

Flashlight Online 2.0 (www.tltgroup.org/Flashlight/FLO2/rubrics.htm) has been developed by The TLT Group (Teaching, Learning, and Technology), a higher education consulting group that helps college and university educators make better use of technology in their teaching endeavors. Flashlight is best described as an online survey and assessment tool that can be used to create second-generation rubrics. This more advanced feature allows users to create a database or bank of criteria for evaluation. Users can then reuse dimensions and scales that have been written previously (i.e., mix and match items to create rubrics more efficiently). Rubrics and results can also be shared online and presented in expanded or compressed formats. The use of rubrics has proliferated to such an extent that the TLT Group has developed a “rubric for rubrics”—a tool for assessing the quality of a rubric.

Rubrics can also be incorporated into online testing programs used in grading online exams. Questionmark Perception (questionmark.com/us/perception/index.aspx) is such an online testing system. It provides for test authoring, deployment/ distribution, test delivery, grading, and item analysis. Questionmark allows for over twenty different question types, such as multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, etc. Almost all are automatically graded by the computer program, but essay and short answer responses demand a human grader and, hence, a rubric. A rubric manager tool within Questionmark allows the instructor to create rubrics and store them in a bank. During the grading process, graders can read the essay and assign scores using a clever interface that displays the student’s essay, the rubric, and the scoring tool on the same screen. Blackboard Learn 9.1 (blackboard.com/), a popular learning management system, has a test-writing and deployment system that incorporates and displays rubrics. Unfortunately, it does not provide an automatic method for conveying or displaying the rubric to students.

In the future, faculty members can look for advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing software that will give computers the ability to read, understand, and grade an essay. Such capabilities have actually existed for some time, but a practical and affordable product is not yet available for daily grading purposes.


last updated august 2019