Good thinkers, in contrast, know that they also have to anticipate the other side of an argument and be prepared to explain why it doesn't undermine the claim they are making. When I included that criterion in the rubric for the persuasive essay, the students who used the rubric tended to consider the reasons against their claim. Students without the rubric did not consider the reasons against their claim. Thinking-centered rubrics seemed to help students think more deeply.

This is especially meaningful because I spent fewer than 30 minutes with each student, and the task did not emphasize memorizing facts.

We often expect students to just know what makes a good essay, a good drawing, or a good science project, so we don't articulate our standards for them. If that child's teacher supplied written expectations—maybe in the form of a rubric—she would have known what counts, and she would have been able to do better work. That little girl needed help figuring out what the grades "count on."

Instructional rubrics make teachers' expectations very clear.

I describe four levels of quality but do not give them labels. In my experience, satisfactory labels are hard to come by, and it is obvious at a glance that a 4 is what everyone should try to achieve and a 1 is something to avoid.

Rubrics make assessing student work quick and efficient, and they help teachers justify to parents and others the grades that they assign to students.

Students are able to see their own work with new eyes, to identify what they have and haven't included in their writing.

Most rubrics have two features in common: a list of "what counts" in a project or assignment, and gradations of quality for each criterion.

Instructional rubrics help teachers teach as well as evaluate student work.

If a student has fallen short in many areas, completing that left-hand column will take more time than simply highlighting a pre-written analytic rubric.

“Students may surprise us if we leave quality open-ended.”

Just like with the analytic rubric, if a target was simply met,  you can just highlight the appropriate phrase in the center column.

A single-point rubric is a lot like an analytic rubric, because it breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria.

Analytic rubrics have two significant disadvantages, however: (1) Creating them takes a lot of time. Writing up descriptors of satisfactory work — completing the “3” column in this rubric, for example — is enough of a challenge on its own. But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a big, big task. And once all that work is done, (2) students won’t necessarily read the whole thing. Facing a 36-cell table crammed with 8-point font is enough to send most students straight into a nap. And that means they won’t clearly understand what’s expected of them.

This is where we see the main advantage of the analytic rubric: It gives students a clearer picture of why they got the score they got. It is also good for the teacher, because it gives her the ability to justify a score on paper, without having to explain everything in a later conversation.

To make feedback even more targeted, you could also highlight specific phrases in the rubric, like, “the recipient is crowded during the meal” to indicate exactly what went wrong.

You see them in standardized testing — the essay portion of the SAT is scored with a 0-6 holistic rubric.

The main disadvantage of a holistic rubric is that it doesn’t provide targeted feedback to students, which means they’re unlikely to learn much from the assignment.

Creating a holistic rubric takes less time than the others, and grading with one is faster, too.

A holistic rubric is the most general kind. It lists three to five levels of performance, along with a broad description of the characteristics that define each level.

What we’re going to do here is describe two frequently used kinds of rubrics, holistic and analytic, plus a less common one called the single-point rubric (my favorite, for the record).