The role of assessment in teaching happens to be a hot issue in education today. Performance-based education poses a challenge for teachers to design instruction that is task oriented. The trend is based on the premise that learning needs to be connected to the lives of the students through relevant tasks that focus on students' ability to use their knowledge and skills in meaningful ways. For the purpose of this tutorial, the use of rubrics will be explored as a viable means of evaluating students' performances. Student performances can be defined as targeted tasks that lead to a product or overall learning outcome.
Products can include a wide range of student works that target specific skills.
Some examples include communication skills such as demonstrated in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, or psychomotor skills requiring physical abilities to perform a given task. Target tasks can also include behavior expectations targeting complex tasks that students are expected to achieve. Using rubrics is one way that teachers can evaluate or assess student performance or proficiency in any given task as it relates to a final product or learning outcome. Thus, rubrics can provide valuable information about the degree to which a student has achieved a defined learning outcome based on specific criteria that defined the framework for evaluation. Rubrics use specific criteria as a basis for evaluating or assessing student performances as indicated in narrative descriptions that are separated into levels of possible performance related to a given task.