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Canvas

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  • Canvas
    • Access Canvas
    • Import Content into Your Canvas Course
    • Upload Your Syllabus
    • Share Your Syllabus
    • Review the Course-Launch Checklist
    • Publish Your Canvas Course
    • Understanding Your Canvas Courses Menu
  • Get Started In Canvas
    • Basic Computer Specifications for Canvas
    • Canvas-Supported Browsers
    • Customize User Display Settings
    • Customize Your Notifications
    • Your Canvas Dashboard
    • Customize "My Courses"
    • Get Started With The Calendar
    • Canvas on a Mobile Device
    • Link Canvas Courses
  • Design Your Course
    • Options To Organize Content
    • Set Up A Homepage
    • Import Content Into Your Canvas Course
      • Remove announcements when copying a Canvas site
      • Adjusting dates when copying a Canvas site
    • Recommended Course-level Settings
    • Modify Your Course Menu
    • Get Started with the Rich Content Editor
    • Get Started With Modules
    • Get Started With Pages
    • Get Started With Files
    • Student View
    • Share Your Syllabus
    • Library Content
    • Add Media In Canvas
    • Canvas Commons
  • Assignments and Grades
    • Get Started With Assignments
    • Get Started with Quizzes
      • Building a Quiz and Grading a Quiz
      • Quiz Options for Supporting Academic Integrity and Accommodating Individual Student Needs
      • Get Started with LockDown Browser & Respondus Monitor
    • Introducing New Quizzes
      • Migrating Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes
      • Building a New Quiz
      • Accessibility & Accommodations in New Quizzes
      • New Quizzes Support for Academic Integrity
      • Grading New Quizzes
    • Get Started with the Gradebook
      • Posting Grades and Feedback
      • Troubleshooting in the Canvas Gradebook
    • Take Attendance In Canvas
    • Student View Of Grades
    • SpeedGrader
    • Grading Schemes
    • Rubrics
    • Peer Review
    • Canvas Discussions
  • People and Groups
    • Add People To Canvas
    • User Roles + Permissions
    • Get Started With Groups
    • Get Started With Analytics
  • Model Canvas Courses
  • Canvas Guide for Students
    • Changing Your Display Name and Setting Pronouns
    • Syllabus Search Student Guide
    • Using the Immersive Reader

Rubrics

Updated on January 25, 2023

Rubrics allow instructors to communicate criteria for grading assignments.  They promote transparency and greater attentiveness to criteria as students can refer to them while completing their work.  They also encourage consistency in grading, and offer convenience as instructors only need to enter general information once and can limit their typing on individual submissions to particular concerns.  Canvas presents rubrics in tables, as seen below:

Rubrics can explain qualities that characterize performance at difference levels, as in this general example for essay assignments:

A generic writing assignment rubric that assesses student work on the following criteria: well-researched, page length, grammar, and answers prompt.
Columbia University Center for Teaching & Learning, Incorporating Rubrics into Your Feedback and Grading Practices, https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/incorporating-rubrics/

Rubrics can also focus on completion of certain tasks, as in the following example from an assignment to identify sources for a research project:

A sample analytic rubric that contains the following criteria: "Find, evaluate, select, and synthesize sources," "New Words," "Books & Sections," "Summary," "Paraphrase," "How relates to topic?," "Related Titles," and "Working Bibliography."
Assignment Odyssey 1: Locating Sources on the Internet by Dr. Alisa Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://freshmancomp.com.

As the following example from a related assignment shows, set standards can be omitted to allow space for free commenting:

A sample rubric that includes various criteria, each worth a different number of points. The area for ratings is left blank for the instructor to make specific comments.
Assignment Odyssey II: Locating Books by Dr. Alisa Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://freshmancomp.com.

Best practices

  • To help students make the most of rubrics, mention them explicitly in instructions for the assignment.
  • To help students track their own progress, use a rubric to identify a particular concern and then refer to it again when another assignment is administered with the same rubric.
  • Provide examples along with the rubric so students can see what constitutes performance at each level.
  • Use rubrics for Peer Review to guide students in commenting on each other’s work.

Rubrics in Canvas are subject to certain limitations:

  • The same rubric can be used on many assignments, but there is not a central place to edit them (so any change needs to be made on any assignment where the rubric is used).
  • Completing the rubric on a student’s assignment does not automatically enter the grade into Speedgrader or the Gradebook.  This must be done manually, but it also allows instructor discretion to enter other comments and adjust the grade there.

For further information, see these guides from Instructure:

  • What is a rubric?
  • How do I create a course-level rubric?
  • How do I add a rubric to an assignment?
  • How do I edit course-level rubric details?
  • How do I use free form comments instead of ratings in a rubric?
  • How do I find existing rubrics in an assignment?
  • How do I manage course level rubrics?
  • How do I grade student work with rubrics?

Additional information on Rubrics can be found in the Rubrics Chapter on the Instructure website.

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