Using Online Rubrics to Provide Better Feedback to Students

In a previous blog post, we explored some of the specific tools in the Brightspace platform that can help principals maximise success for their schools. Now let’s look at how teachers can use online rubrics in Brightspace to provide better feedback to students.

Receiving feedback from teachers is like magic for students. Whether it’s for day-to-day learning activities, assignments, or even small achievements, providing detailed and informative student feedback plays an important role in helping your learners move forward. This is especially true when your students are facing diverse circumstances and learning at different paces.

The fact is, students who receive in-depth teacher comments rather than stand-alone grades on assignments tend to perform better and show greater interest in learning tasks than their peers.* Without context, your students may merely view grades as vague indicators that leave them confused about their performance.

The need to deliver meaningful feedback poses a challenging question:

How can you implement student feedback best practices that are consistent, efficient, and supportive?

The answer can be found in the Rubrics tool in the Brightspace platform.

In Brightspace, you can design robust online rubrics that promote student learning, simplify evaluating students’ work, and save time in your grading process. By using a built-in editor to attach videos, images, course materials, or your even own recording, you can make your feedback more interactive for students in both traditional classrooms and distance learning environments.

For your convenience, there are two types of rubrics in Brightspace.

Holistic Rubrics

Holistic rubrics are useful when you need to assess your students based on a single criterion, such as a percentage or a text-only scoring method. This rubric type will help you assess a student’s overall achievement in an activity or a module and evaluate them on predefined achievement levels.

Analytic Rubrics

Analytic rubrics are useful when you need to assess your students based on multiple criteria, such as several activities or assessments within a module. With this rubric type, you can attach standards from your jurisdiction and use levels of achievement and assessment criteria.

You can then assign values to criteria and measure overall achievement by totaling the criteria in a specific rubric. Based on your needs, you can choose to use a text-only rubric or a hybrid of points and text as your scoring method.

If you want to provide more extensive feedback to your students, you can include multiple rubrics in a single assignment. You can also set a default scoring rubric and even attach multiple rubrics that relate to that specific assignment.

In our next post, we’ll explore how teachers can improve classroom transparency for parents and guardians with the Brightspace for Parents tool.

* People for Education, “To grade or not to grade: Assessment in a Pandemic,” People for Education, 2020.

Written by

Puneet Kaur

Puneet Kaur is the Success Coach at D2L. In her role, she partners with K-12 educators and leaders to align Brightspace technology with their educational goals and achieve student success. She is passionate about the 21st Century models of learning that empower learners to become successful individuals in all walks of their lives. Puneet graduated in MEd from the University of Toronto in 2018 and her major research paper was, “Paving a Path for Global Competencies in the Ontario K-12 curriculum.” Prior to joining D2L, she worked as a curriculum analyst, education-researcher, and elementary level educator.