The use of rubrics to support AfL in higher education

Research on the use of rubrics has shown that rubrics can aid assessors in achieving acceptable levels of consistency when scoring performance tasks. However, by making assessment expectations explicit the use of rubrics has also been shown to promote learning and/or improve instruction. In this contribution we draw on four systematic reviews on the use of rubrics, as well as some other significant publications. From this research we propose and present two different ways in which the transparency provided by rubrics have been shown to support student learning, together with examples of relevant studies. These two ways are through (1) facilitating the understanding and use of feedback and through (2) facilitating students’ self-regulated learning. Based on the same research, we have also sketched recommendations for how to design and use rubrics to support formative-assessment practices. Examples of such recommendations are to use an analytic scoring strategy, several quality levels, task-level specificity and direct criteria, but also to make the rubrics accessible to the students. Furthermore, we have addressed some of the important critique that have been voiced against the use of rubrics, such as the “indeterminacy of criteria”. This paper, however, only focus on the two ways in which the use of rubrics facilitate student learning.