Rubrics vs. Checklists
My first encounter with a rudimentary form of project-based learning occurred more than 30 years ago when I was teaching sixth-grade in a gritty middle school just east of downtown Los Angeles.
My traditional teaching style was a disaster for both me and my students during my first two years. During one Christmas break I played a game of Risk with my friends, which led to a brainstorm. What if I adapted the game to structure my unit on ancient Greece. A project called City State Warfare was born.
The students worked in groups for about a month completing the project (and playing a complex version of Risk that was anchored in commercial, cultural, and geopolitical relations between various city states). The students ultimately wrote and presented lengthy reports on their city states.
What I quickly realized was that they had completed a daunting list of educational tasks during the project. Both I and my students needed a checklist to track those tasks. But a checklist didn’t give me qualitative information. I had to create a rubric to collect that data. This initial experience in assessing project-based learning set me off on a career-spanning quest to train teachers how to use both rubrics and checklists to assess student work, especially in PBL.
What Is a Checklist Good For?
Think about the requirements for a written report for sixth-graders. Mine usually looks like this:
Minimum of four pages, typed, one-inch margins
Bibliography (not www.wiklpedia.org)
12-point, Times New Roman, Double-Spaced
3 photos, illustrations, or maps in an appendix (doesn’t count toward your four pages)
Submit draft on March 20
Submit final on March 27
This list includes all the practical information a student needs to complete the task on time. The list is quantifiable. It is not a metric of quality - not a single word on this checklist speaks to the quality of the work.
This list appears as both a stand-alone document and as a column in my rubric. I lump the details from my checklist under the criteria (domain) of “Required Elements.” Yes, students receive points for these required elements. But to repeat the caveat, the criteria of “Required Elements” is not a qualitative metric. Two questions shape this section of the rubric/checklist: Did the student complete each component of the task? Did the student turn it in on time?
A Quick Look at Rubrics
There are three main types of rubrics:
Analytic Rubrics: These break down an assignment into specific component parts. Each section is scored independently using a rating scale, and the final score is aggregated by adding each component part. Analytic rubrics provide detailed feedback on various aspects of performance but take more time to create and use.
Holistic Rubrics: These consist of a single scale with all criteria considered together. The instructor scores the assignment as a whole, without judging components separately. Holistic rubrics are quicker to use and can be applied consistently by multiple graders, but they don't provide detailed feedback for improvement.
Developmental Rubrics: These are similar to analytic rubrics but focus on assessing student progress (formative) rather than evaluating a finished product. They are used to identify student weaknesses and track development over time. Developmental rubrics are not typically used for grading but rather for monitoring student growth.
Typically, a rubric includes the following components:
Task Description (placed atop the rubric): This provides a clear overview of what students are expected to accomplish.
Criteria (Rows): These are the specific skills, knowledge, or behaviors to be evaluated. For example, in a writing assignment, criteria might include critical thinking, structure, research, originality, and writing style (mechanics, usage, grammar, and syntax).
Performance Levels (Columns): These describe the degrees of achievement for each criterion. Performance levels can be represented by:
Numeric scales (1-4 or 1-6) or scoring (point) ranges
Descriptive tags (e.g., excellent, proficient, developing)
Qualitative descriptions of performance quality
Performance Standards: These are detailed descriptors that explain what each performance level looks like for each criterion. They provide specific, objective indicators of how well a student has met each aspect of the task.
I have seen three-, four-, and five-column rubrics. My preference is for a three-column rubric with performance levels of Below Standard, At Standard, and Above Standard. I detest five-column rubrics because teachers, students, and parents often equate these with the traditional five letter grades (A, B, C, D, F).
When to Use Checklists, Rubrics or Both
During the 12 years I taught middle and high school I used evergreen rubrics for the four Cs (critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity) and then wrote project-specific rubrics for extended inquiries such as my City-State Warfare project.
These rubrics were used in concert with project-specific checklists. Again, checklists provide quantifiable information for teacher and student while rubrics provide qualitative information.
There are two reasons why I never used rubrics to assess daily work or homework: I didn’t have enough time to do that and the assignments weren’t complex enough to require extended qualitative feedback. In most cases, I didn’t even use checklists for these types of assignments.
Calibrating Students on Rubrics
Both of my sons played basketball, volleyball, and soccer during their school years. They and their teammates always knew the “assessment criteria” for these sports: Score more points than your opponent. Accordingly, students should have similar clarity about the assessment criteria for schoolwork.
I used a jigsaw strategy to accomplish that goal. At the beginning of the year I would sit down with each project group and run a jigsaw in which they translated the descriptors and criteria of my 4Cs rubrics into student-friendly language. I would follow the same process for the project-specific rubric at the beginning of each project.
The checklists for projects were provided to the students both in paper form with their project packet and digitally via our learning management system. The rubrics were disseminated in the same way and then hung on the wall in our project center.
Technology Can Ease the Burden of Assessment
The use of rubrics creates a time crunch for teachers in multiple ways. Rubrics have to be written or edited to fit your classroom context and to align with standards. Creating the gradients of performance (descriptors) is a painstaking process. More daunting is the task of using rubrics (perhaps multiple rubrics) to assess student work. I have always felt that the project-based learning assessment process is the biggest impediment to the widespread adoption of my favored pedagogy.
If you have read any of my writing over the last few years you will be aware that I am a passionate advocate for the use of generative AI to lighten the load on teachers. I wrote a custom GPT (think app) called Rubric Generator, which asks the user a few questions and then generates a standards-based rubric for any project or extended task.
Braide.ai, which was founded by two friends of mine, offers a more complete solution to the second time crunch I mentioned. Braide, which uses multiple AIs, can automate the process of using rubrics to assess student work for formative or summative purposes.
Providing my students with all the information they need to be successful is important to me. Giving them timely, actionable feedback is part of that process. Completing the task of assessment often requires teachers to use both checklists and rubrics. If technology can ease the burden, we would be silly not to use it. According to a study done by Education Week, the average teacher works 54 hours per week. Let’s try to shave a few hours off that total by using best practices and every tool available to us.
