Rubrics as active learning tools
Dr Paula Cardoso
What is the idea?
Rubrics are traditionally considered as assessment tools that facilitate the learning assessment process, both for teachers and students. However, more than helping promote an assessment tool for authentic learning, it can be one of the main active learning tools. Students will not only read the assessment rubrics pre-created by teachers, but they are invited to collaboratively create it, thus becoming even more engaged with their learning process right from the beginning. This idea will explain, step by step, how to successfully involve students into rubric building and reflect on their future learning, instead of only reflecting on their previous work.
Why this idea?
Active learning research is unanimous in stating that students benefit from becoming active participants and their learning increases when they have agency in building their own learning process.
Traditionally, rubrics are seen as tools capable of measuring and communicating student performance, based on previously defined criteria, that are described across a continuum of performance levels. According to Andrade (2010) and Jonsson (2014), they have been considered helpful because they are explicit regarding what is expected from students’ learning and, by doing this, they support student agency and self-regulation. Since students know in advance the defined performance criteria and levels, rubrics have an essentially formative role when directed to the assessment process. However, rubrics are not only assessment tools; they also represent one of the learning strategies with the greatest potential, as they allow students to build a learning path using the matrix of indicators and respective performance quality criteria as guidance maps. That is, instead of students getting feedback on their learning, they get feed-forward, a useful strategy to guide them towards future learning
In the context of emergency remote teaching, it became even more vital to define strategies that would promote students’ self-regulation of learning, allowing them to simultaneously become more autonomous and closely followed.
The revision of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) is essential for us to better understand the advantages of this methodology, as it alludes to the increasing sequence of the complexity of cognitive processes.
Traditional learning usually involves basic cognitive processes that students need to mobilise, namely to ‘remember’, ‘understand’ and ‘apply’, whereas most complex processes (‘analyse’, ‘evaluate’ and ‘create’) are often associated with autonomous work. Thus, co-creating rubrics puts students in the most complex cognitive stage and therefore helps teachers support students in developing more elaborate skills, which is paramount in the context of active learning.
How could others implement this idea?
So, how can rubrics be used as learning tools, where students co-create the criteria and performance s