Rubrics are a powerful tool for assessing student learning. Unlike a traditional scoring guide which tells the students how many questions they answered correctly or gives an overall score for an assignment, a rubric defines levels of quality of the work in certain areas on which the students should be focussed. Thus, the score on a rubric not only tells the students how well their work matches the expectation, it describes the level of work they have done.

Rubrics are often developed by teachers or taken from published materials, but in accordance with CL principles, students can effectively create their own rubrics and use them to score their own or each other’s work. In addition to scoring students’ work, rubrics that evaluate how well students are working collaboratively are a powerful tool to build important learning skills.

Teachers have important roles in guiding the creation of rubrics. In the following example, the teacher has given the class four traits on which to evaluate their work on a cooperatively written essay –content, logic, grammar, and spelling. In addition, she has asked the class which CL skills they think should be used in the writing assignment and added these to the rubric. Once the students complete a draft of the assignment using a CL technique such as Circle of Writers, they compare their work to the rubric and give their group a score on each trait. They could also trade their essay with another group, and the groups could evaluate each other’s work. In this case, they would only evaluate the work, not the other group’s application of CL principles.

 Table 1: Sample Rubric for CL Writing Task

Rubrics can be used in many CL activities such as Group Work, Skits, etc. As class members watch presentations by groups of other groups, they can score the presentation using a rubric that the teacher provides or whole class has developed collaboratively. Groups would then discuss their scoring and reach consensus before presenting their evaluation to the students that presented.