Rubrics in Nursing Education

Evaluation of educational is the assessment process of appraising and characterizing aspect(s) of an educational process. There are many different evaluation tools, such as rating scales, checklists, rubrics, and many others. The ones that are mentioned are the tools that state particular criteria and provide students and teachers with an opportunity to collect information and to make judgments about students’ knowledge about the outcomes. These tools suggest systematic ways of gathering data about specific knowledge, skills, and behaviors. The quality of the obtained information via rating scales, checklists, and rubric depends on the quality of the descriptors of the assessment (Assessments in mathematics, 2008).

Nurse educators decide what type of grading guides is the best for the assignment, as some of them are more suitable for one assignment and other ones for a different one. Checklists provide a yes/no format in relation to a student demonstrating particular criteria. Checklists may be applied to record observations of one student, a group of students, o even the entire class (Assessments in mathematics, 2008).

Teachers use Rating Scales if there is a need to indicate the frequency or degree of the skills, strategies, behaviors, that the student displays. Rating scales declare the criteria and give three to four response selections in order to describe the frequency or quality of the work by the student. Teachers use rating scales to measure the observations and students use them for the self-assessment. This tool also provides students with information for improving their performance. In the case of rating scales, the descriptive word plays a bigger role than the number related to it. The more descriptive and exact the scale words, the more reliable the tool is.

A rubric is a scoring guide that provides students with a clear description of proficient student work (Markham, Larmer, & Ravitz, 2003). It lists the criteria for what counts in an assignment and provides gradations of quality from excellent to poor for each criterion (Andrade, 2005). So, rubrics include a continuous measurement scale with the description of each level of performance characteristics in details. These specifications focus on the quality of the performance or a product, and not on the quantity of it, for example, not the number of spelling errors, or written paragraphs. Raters use the rubrics to assess the performance of the student in order to include the result in a grade (for reporting). Rubrics increase the reliability and consistency of scoring. Rubrics may be used to evaluate individuals or groups and may be compared over time. In the educational process, rubrics are considered to be a way to both efficiently evaluate student’s work and to discuss the expectations clearly and directly to students. The use of rubrics in a teaching process allows considering of what demonstrations of studying should look like and describe the steps of the growth and development of skills, knowledge, and understandings (Assessments in mathematics, 2008).

The best in rubrics is that they are designed to describe and not evaluate. Of course, it is sometimes used for evaluation, but the main point of it is you match the performance to the description, and not to “judge” it((Susan M. Brookhart, 2013).

Usually, rubrics are categorized by the two aspects of their creation: whether the rubric treats the criteria one at a time or together, and whether the rubric is general and can be applied to a family of similar assignments or it is specific for the particular task and can be used only with one assessment (Susan M. Brookhart, 2013). There are two different types of rubrics – analytic and holistic ones.

Analytic rubrics characterize the work on each criterion separately, one -at-the-time. On the contrary, Holistic rubrics describe the work by applying all of the stated criteria at once, which enables an overall judgment about work’s quality. The advantages of using analytic rubric are that it provides the teacher with diagnostic information, it gives helpful feedback to the students, it is easier to link to instruction (in comparison to holistic rubrics), and it is great for formative assessment, but applicable to summative assessment as well. Holistic rubrics are beneficial if the scoring needs to be completed in short terms (it is much faster than with analytic rubrics). It is better for the summative assessment. However, a single score (in the case of holistic rubrics) does not provide the students with information on how to improve the work done.

For most of the assignments, analytic rubrics are better, because focusing on the criteria one at a time is better for formative assessment: students see what part of their work needs corrections or extra attention, and what to do with all of that. Focusing on one specific criterion at a time is also quite good for grading for making decisions about the future.

One classroom purpose where holistic rubrics can work better than analytic rubrics is the occasion, where students will not know the final summative assessment results and this information is needed only for grading. Grading with the help of rubrics is quicker when there is only one decision required and not a separate decision for every criterion ((Susan M. Brookhart, 2013).

Every assessment tool has its advantages and challenges, and grading rubrics are no exception. Speaking of the benefits of such tools, here is the list of public pros:

1.Rubrics help in categorizing students’ work. As rubric provides different levels of success, through meeting the stated benchmark with awards points accordingly, students know what they are their targets and work towards them. Since point values are known from the beginning, it is not hard for the teachers to place works into appropriate categories and summarise the points for a grade.

2.Objective grading. A considerable advantage of rubrics is their ability to record grades objectively. With a rubric, you do not have to know the student’s name and personal information to grade. Theoretically, you could grade all projects with just the typed text component and a rubric. Rubrics, therefore, keep grades objective. Everyone is scored the same because set scoring components are laid out from the start.

3.It is time-saving. It is a very comfortable technique for the teacher as once the appropriate rubric is developed – all work needs to be done is going through the project and looking for the criteria that are included in the rubric. Grading is carried out by the points or a quality scale mentioned in the rubric previously. This process saves much time because the focus goes to areas that are most important.

To speak of limitations that this evaluation tool offers, here is the list of cons:

1.Rubrics do not take outside circumstances into account. Considering a situation, when a student is doing his best, but still struggles with the learning process, the rubric is not the best option to choose out of other evaluation tools. Most of the rubrics take into account the finished product and do not include time, progress, effort, another circumstance as its elements, which is quite wrong in case of the student with learning disabilities.

2.Not for artistic projects. Most teachers use the tool of the rubric for any kind of student project, but the work that consists artistic skills and efforts is the hardest to evaluate with a rubric, as it might be too analytical for such an assignment. This leads to the conclusion that rubrics are not suitable for some of the learning processes.

The value of calibrating raters on the use of rubrics to grade student work. The main idea of calibration is to make sure that a group of teachers assess the work by student consistently and according to the scoring rubric. This increases the reliability of the evaluation data collected. If the scoring is calibrated according to the protocol, a piece of student work gets the same grade regardless of who is doing the evaluation. This is due to all teachers interpreting and applying the same rubric in the same way. It is essential because rubrics alone cannot ensure that the scoring of the student work will be consistent. Even in the case, when the educators agree upon one rubric, it is an often phenomenon, that they temp to apply it to student work differently. Via the process of calibration, teachers agree on how the rubric should be applied to specific examples of the student work. This provides the scoring outcome with higher reliability and accuracy and also helps to widen the teacher’s understanding of expectations for student work, as these are expressed in the rubric.

Conducting a pilot study before starting a more extensive study is beneficial for identifying significant problems that can influence the outcome of the more extensive study. It is also essential to do so because it can determine whether this specific rubric is appropriate for the given assignment (a more extensive study). This is why it is a good idea to pilot before implementing a rubric (RIDE).

Providing students with the evaluation too before the assignment is due can be controversial. If the student knows all the criteria the teacher is going to check while evaluating his/her work, then the learner has a chance to achieve the score he/she was targeting. Moreover, this is both, an advantage and a challenge of such practice, since there are different students, and when some of them follow all the requirements to get the best score, the other ones will do the minimum to pass the class.

Rubrics are important because they provide students with the clarification of the qualities their work needs to contain in order to achieve success.

References

Assessments in mathematics, 2008.

Andrade, H. (2015). “Teaching with rubrics: The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

Brookhart, S.M. (2013). “How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading.”

Markham, T., Larmer, J., & Ravitz, J. (2003). “Project-based learning handbook: A guide to standards-focused project-based learning for middle and high school teachers.”

Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) & the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, “Calibration protocol for scoring student work.”

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

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"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

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freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
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"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]
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