Rubric Through Rubistar

Introduction

Rubric is a set of instructions, a list of guidelines and/or a document articulating your expectations. Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (2015) defines it as “a title or a set of instructions written in a book, an exam paper etc.” It helps learners get what is expected in a given task. So rubric has to be precise and clear enough to articulate expectations for the task. Andrade (n.d) in a little elaborative way, explains rubric as "…a means of communicating expectations for an assignment, providing focused feedback on works in progress, and grading final products.” In a rubric, we may show the scores/grades that the learners can obtain if they produce the task as stated in the instructions.

Now, you might be little worried that creating a rubric would take really a long time and further, you don't have much time to draft rubric for every potential task designed for your learners. Do not worry! What you need is just to prepare an outline, and the rest a web tool, Rubistar will do for you. It is a free tool supported by a grant from the U.S. Dept. of Education. After creating one, you can publish it either in the Rubistar database creating your own account or download/print immediately to use it for your task. The good thing is it has a customizable rubric so you can adapt the rubric as necessity or remove all the categories and begin as a scratch piece of work.

Rubistar has a plenty of headings which you can select and start creating for the task you design. I am sure your students will produce the task in a more precise way meeting the guidelines you have developed in your rubric. Some people may argue that it is more a guided form resultantly, students can’t be creative enough in their tasks. What I believe is every task has some expectations but there’s a plenty of room for learners’ creativity. Rubric only helps learners/ performers provide guidelines; therefore, in a process of doing the task, they gain clarity in the task which leads to their confidence.

How to Create?

There are many tutorials. This link will take you to the tutorial given by the original site. If you wish to watch a video tutorial, you may watch it.

This is the rubric that I had created through Rubistar for my project on minisaga which is in my Webquest. It may be of your interest.

Now let’s look into Ruibstar’s plus and minus sides.

The Plus sides

• Rubistar is free and easy to handle. 
• We can save our rubric in its database for future use or download/print immediately.
• It has customizable templates to create certain type of rubrics which lessons our time to produce.
• Since it’s an encouraging tool from the perspective of its use, teachers might be motivated to create rubrics for most of the tasks that can further generate clarity to the learners.

The Minus Sides

• While printing there’s a Rubistar logo which appears on the very top. The only strategy to avoid it is to copy and paste in word doc and arrange it further that takes quite a long time.
• In the very beginning, we cannot add any columns to the customizable template if we wish to have more than 4 categories unless we publish it.

Finally, yes, rubric can be a big help to guide learners through the task. In the meantime, it also assists teachers to restrict unexpected post-evaluation reactions of the learners. Equally, it mitigates the teachers’ role which may require for further possible clarification of some tasks.

Rubistar can help you! Are you ready to create your rubric?

 References

Andrade, H. (n.d.). What is a rubric? Retrieved from http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=WhatIs

Hornby, A.S. ( 2015). In Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (9^th ed.).  Oxford: OUP.