Rubrics: Tools for Making Learning Goals and Evaluation Criteria Explicit for Both Teachers and Learners

Introduction of new teaching strategies often expands the expectations for student learning, creating a parallel need to redefine how we collect the evidence that assures both us and our students that these expectations are in fact being met. The default assessment strategy of the typical large, introductory, college-level science course, the multiple- choice (fixed response) exam, when used to best advantage can provide feedback about what students know and recall about key concepts. Leaving aside the difficulty inherent in designing a multiple-choice exam that captures deeper understandings of course material, its limitations become particularly notable when learning objectives include what students are able to do as well as know as the result of time spent in a course. If we want students to build their skill at conducting guided laboratory investigations, developing reasoned arguments, or communicating their ideas, other means of assessment such as papers, demonstrations (the “practical exam”), other demonstrations of problem solving, model building, debates, or oral presentations, to name a few, must be enlisted to serve as benchmarks of progress and/or in the assignment of grades. What happens, however, when students are novices at responding to these performance prompts when they are used in the context of science learning, and faculty are novices at communicating to students what their expectations for a high-level performance are? The more familiar terrain of the multiple-choice exam can lull both students and instructors into a false sense of security about the clarity and objectivity of the evaluation criteria (Wiggins, 1989 ) and make these other types of assessment strategies seem subjective and unreliable (and sometimes downright unfair) by comparison. In a worst-case scenario, the use of alternatives to the conventional exam to assess student learning can lead students to feel that there is an implicit or hidden curriculum—the private curriculum that seems to exist only in the mind's eye of a course instructor. Use of rubrics provides one way to address these issues. Rubrics not only can be designed to formulate standards for levels of accomplishment and used to guide and improve performance but also they can be used to make these standards clear and explicit to students. Although the use of rubrics has become common practice in the K–12 setting (Luft, 1999 ), the good news for those instructors who find the idea attractive is that more and more examples of the use of rubrics are being noted at the college and university level, with a variety of applications (Ebert-May, undated; Ebert-May et al., 1997 ; Wright and Boggs, 2002 ; Moni et al., 2005 ; Porter, 2005 ; Lynd-Balta, 2006 ).