Developing a Rubric?

I was attending a meeting yesterday and a few of the instructors began discussing rubrics. I wondered how many of you use rubrics and how much time you might invest in their development? As you probably know by know, I'm all about shared knowledge. Anything that is open source, well constructed and ....FREE!

I began my search last night after the meeting and I found RubiStar, which is a free tool designed to help teachers create quality rubrics. If you aren't familiar with rubrics, Heidi Goodrich, a rubrics expert, defines a rubric as "a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work or 'what counts.'" Generally rubrics specify the level of performance expected for several levels of quality.

According to the site, "RubiStar is a tool to help the teacher who wants to use rubrics but does not have the time to develop them from scratch. RubiStar provides generic rubrics that can simply be printed and used for many typical projects and research assignments. The unique thing about RubiStar, however, is that it provides these generic rubrics in a format that can be customized. The teacher can change almost all suggested text in the rubric to make it fit their own project."

Another interesting thing about Rubistar is that it can be integrated with Moodle and Blackboard. The site claims that you can "easily aggregate student achievement across classes, programs, and even entire schools to generate NCLB data or customized outcomes data for accreditation purposes."

Check out a rubric for "Building A Structure : Alternative Energy Models" developed by Janice Haney.

I hope this site will help those of you that develop rubrics! J.T.