In this module you will learn how to write a formative assessment rubric. This builds on the learning continuum that was described in
Module 1 – Describe a learning continuum. A high quality formative assessment rubric will support you to gather objective and consistent evidence about what a student can currently say, make, write and do, and this information will assist you to make decisions about what to teach next.
Activities
1. Read pages 11–16 of the Guide to Formative Assessment Rubrics
The Guide to Formative Assessment Rubrics (pages 11–16) explains the three main reasons for the development of formative assessment rubrics:
- to describe the things students do, say, make and write when developing their knowledge and skills
- to support consistent assessment data to be gathered and interpreted
- to communicate assessment criteria to intended users.
This part of the Guide provides information about the steps involved in writing a high quality formative assessment rubric to ensure the rubric fulfils the reasons for developing it.
2. Download the 'Learning continuum and rubric' template
If you did not download this document in Module 1, use the link below to download a template to use as you write a rubric. The template helps standardise the process of writing a formative assessment rubric, so that when teachers collaborate it is easy to orient themselves.
Learning continuum and formative assessment rubric template
3. Watch the video 'Develop a formative assessment rubric'
Watch the video on how to develop a formative assessment rubric. This will give you an overview of the steps involved while outlining the features of a high quality formative assessment rubric. The video also provides practical advice and tips for writing a formative assessment rubric.
You may like to pause the video to draft parts of your formative assessment rubric in the downloaded template and/or discuss the points raised with your colleagues to clarify and extend your understandings.
The duration of this video is 11 minutes 58 seconds.
Module 2 – Develop a formative assessment rubric video transcript
Module 2 – Develop a formative assessment rubric – PowerPoint
4. Decide on your organising elements and actions
The first column of the formative assessment rubric is the ‘organising element/s’. These signal the concepts or through lines that are going to be the focus of this formative assessment rubric. The organising element/s might be strands or sub-strands from the curriculum. You may have already started to think about these when you were selecting the focus for the learning continuum in Module 1.
The ‘action/s’ are the finer detailed skills that lie within each organising element. Actions represent the things a typical student can do, say, make or write that are representative of the organising element. The more straightforward the actions are in your formative assessment rubric, the easier it will be to use the rubric. It is quicker to gather evidence about specific, smaller components, avoiding the situation where you are unsure how to assess a student who achieves part of a multifaceted description.
Look at the examples in the Guide for further support in developing your organising elements and actions. You might also like to explore the samples that have been developed by other teachers for specific curriculum areas at
Put formative assessment rubrics into practice.
5. Write quality criteria for each action
When writing quality criteria it is important to:
- focus on what students do, say, make or write
- align the criteria with phases in the learning continuum
- describe increasing sophistication (this relates to how well something is done, not how often it is done correctly or how far through a process a student has progressed).
When writing quality criteria, it can be helpful to refer to taxonomies like SOLO (Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome) to guide your thinking.
Sometimes it is not possible to write a quality criterion matched to each phase in the learning continuum. It is fine to leave cells blank. This is shown in the examples in the Guide and in the samples developed by other teachers.
You can use the examples in the Guide as a model for your quality criteria. You might also like to look at the samples developed by other teachers to stimulate your thinking.
6. Evaluate your work
- Do the quality criteria in your formative assessment rubric identify skills that a student can do, say, make or write? Try reading the quality criteria aloud. Can you visualise a student doing that ‘thing’?
- Make sure that the quality criteria describe the increasing sophistication of what students do, say, make or write. Using words such as ‘sometimes’, ‘limited’, ‘with guidance’, ‘always’ or ‘independently’ or applying a numerical description to a quality criterion does not provide enough granularity.
- Make sure your wording is clear. If the wording is ambiguous, this will make assessing what a student can make, say, do or write less accurate and the assessment may be based on subjectivity. One teacher-participant in the VCAA’s formative assessment rubric workshops said, ‘The most challenging conceptual aspect about the formative assessment was the language that we used within the rubric. We needed to avoid vague quantitative statements.’
- Check that the quality criteria aligns to a phase in the learning continuum.
- Ask yourself whether this formative assessment rubric is task dependent or whether you could use it several times with different tasks that are focused on gathering evidence about the same knowledge and skills.
Practice considerations
- Remove any adverbs and adjectives in your quality criteria and focus on verbs to describe the differences between phases. This will make your rubric easy to use and you will be able to gather consistent objective data to inform decisions about what to teach next.
- Restrict each quality criterion to one central idea (don’t use ‘and’) to ensure clarity of criteria and ease of assessment. It becomes difficult to make decisions when a student can do one part of a criterion and not the other; it is better to create another action in the formative assessment rubric.
- Focus on using positive language (things that a student can do) that all intended users can understand. Don’t use jargon. You will be able to use the quality criteria in the rubric to give feedback to students if the rubric is written in positive language that encourages students about what they can do and if students can see where their learning is going next.
- While you may be tempted to write one very large formative assessment rubric covering lots of different organising elements and actions, it is easier to write smaller targeted formative assessment rubrics. One teacher in the VCAA’s formative assessment rubrics workshops said, ‘The rubric made it very easy to assess student learning because it was only addressing one skill and so you can really focus on exactly where the student is at.’
- Consider whether you are going to share the formative assessment rubric with students. This decision may be influenced by the age of your students and/or the complexity of the skills being assessed. You can still make clear to students the learning intentions of an activity or task without giving them a copy of the rubric. If you do give them a copy of the rubric, talk it over and make sure they understand the terms used.
Additional resources
- If you are not familiar with the SOLO taxonomy mentioned in the Guide you may want to undertake some additional reading. Here is one reference you may find useful: Hattie, J. & Purdie, N. (1998) ‘The Solo model: Addressing fundamental measurement issues’, in Dart, B. & Boulton-Lewis, G. M. (eds)
Teaching and learning in higher education, Camberwell, Vic, Australian Council of Educational Research.
- Refer to the
Victorian Curriculum F–10. Viewing the curriculum in the ‘Scope and Sequence’ format helps to clearly see the continuum describing growth across eleven years of schooling. Scope and sequence charts are found in the ‘Introduction’ to each curriculum area.
- Refer to ‘Further reading’ on page 25 of
The Guide to Formative Assessment Rubrics.
Move on to Module 3
You have now developed your learning continuum and rubric to be used for formative assessment purposes. The next step, Module 3, is to design a task, or teaching and learning activity, that enables students to demonstrate what they can say, make, write or do.
These materials were prepared in 2019. Please note that this area of research is evolving fast, therefore these materials should be supported with additional evidence bases that more accurately reflect best practice after 2024. It is recommended that these materials be used with consideration of updated research after this date.