Eyster's Rubric for Lab Reports

INDEX

Advantages of a rubric
Standards
Format of the rubric
The rubric
Teaching students to use a rubric
Team teaching
Scoring
Feedback sheet
Adapting this rubric for your students
Writing your own rubric
More information on rubrics
Questions?

The following hierarchical box rubric was designed to help students and teachers evaluate laboratory reports, especially those written for open ended lab or field work. This web page is designed for teacher use, and was written by Dr. Linda S. Eyster, Milton Academy, Milton, Massaschusetts, U.S.A. 02138.

ADVANTAGES OF A RUBRIC: there are many advantages of using a rubric.

The rubric allows students to see what is important (by including an expectation in the rubric you are telling the student that that expectation is important).
It allows the students to see what constitutes different levels of proficiency (e.g.,what is the difference between a good graph and an excellent graph).
Students can evaluate their own work and work of their peers before they turn it in to you.
The rubric can be used to evaluate individual student or team work.
If you are co-teaching (team teaching), the rubric will allow teachers to score work comparably.
Although it takes time to read through the rubric and get to know it, once you do know the rubric you should find that evaluating a lab report is quicker in providing detailed feedback about student performance, than if you were to handwrite out those same comments.
The rubric can be adapted for use in other science courses and other grade levels than the one for which it was designed.
Because students are using the same rubric (and thus have the same expectations) over time, it is easy for both the teacher and student to track performance and to determine which areas need more work and practice.
The rubric addresses National Science Education Standards.

FORMAT OF THE RUBRIC: This rubric is laid out in the following way: the first 6 rows refer to experimental design, the next 3 lines refer to behavioral expectations, and the rest of the rows refer (in standard sequence) to the main parts of a lab report for open-ended experimentation. The"experimental design" portion of this rubric was published in a slightly condensed form in the December 1997 issue of The Science Teacher, under the title "A comprehensive rubric: helping teachers grade process oriented tasks", (author Linda S. Eyster). The full rubric provided here consists of 27 rows, each with five boxes ranging from Excellent (on the left) to Poor (on the right).

CLICK here to view the rubric. You must have Microsoft Word to read and edit the file in its standard formatting. If you print out the full rubric in a small font size, you can cut and paste it to fit on the fronts and backs of two sheets of paper.

STANDARDS:

The rubric addresses a variety of Assessment, Teaching, and Content standards:

It is deliberately designed, and has an explicitly stated purpose (Assessment Standard A).
The rubric is fair and can be modified (Assessment Standard D).
It is one of the multiple methods available for gathering data about student understanding and ability (Teaching Standard C).
It allows teachers to use assessment data to guide teaching and to guide students in self-assessment (Teaching Standard C).
The rubric is useful for evaluating extended investigations ( which are part of Teaching Standard D) and can be used to nurture collaboration among students.
It evaluates student ability to 1) design and conduct scientific investigations, 2) recognize and analyze alternative explanations, and 3) to communicate and defend a scientific argument (Content Standard A).

TEACHING STUDENTS TO USE THE RUBRIC:

To help your students learn to use the rubric, I suggest that you begin with just one section of a lab report and the appropriate lines of the rubric. You might choose just the title or just a single visual display, such as a graph or table. Have the students learn to write an excellent title and at the same time begin to understand about the layout and use of a hierarchical box rubric.

I also give students copies of portions of real, student-produced lab reports to evaluate. For example I might give them a copy of a graph and have the students evaluate the usefulness and layout of the graph and the clarity of the figure caption by using the appropriate lines of the rubric. Actually using pieces of the rubric by themselves helps students understand the wording and expectations and leads to the stage where they can evaluate their own work before they turn it in.

TEAM TEACHING:

If several teachers are teaching the "same" course and using the same rubric, it helps to examine teacher-to-teacher consistency. Each teacher can evaluate several unmarked pieces of student work and then all teachers can compare their scores. When disagreements occur, it is a good opportunity to discuss those disagreements and decide if expectations are different or if the wording of the rubric needs to be clarified.

SCORING:

To provide feedback to students, you can put check marks in the boxes (labeled excellent through poor) without assigning any numerical values or grades to those outcomes. If you want to assign numerical scores, the rubric is designed with the following values: Excellent=16, Very Good = 13, Good=12, Fair=11, and 8 = Poor. After you have finished putting checks in one box for each row, count the number of checks in each column and multiply that number times the point value of the column. Then add up the total and divide by the maximum possible score. For example, I typically use 25 rows in the rubric with the excellent boxes worth 16 points, so the maximum possible score would be 400. You can change the point value to suit the needs of your students..

FEEDBACK SHEET:

A feedback sheet is a grid of empty boxes or boxes with key words that is organized to match your hierarchical box rubric. One of the advantages of a feedback sheet is that is uses less paper than the full rubric, and it is designed to be only one sheet of paper long so that the overall distribution of performance markings can be easily scanned by both teacher and student.

I've provided one sample feedback sheet. This sample is the most detailed feedback sheet that I use; you can empty out more of the words if they are distracting. The simplest feedback sheet I use has only a key word or two in each Excellent box, but students find this sheet more time consuming to use because it forces them to return to their full rubric and reread the appropriate boxes (not such a bad idea!). When you are evaluating a lab report, you can check off the appropriate boxes that describe the level of proficiency shown. I give every student a feedback sheet, even if work was done in groups.

ADAPTING THIS RUBRIC FOR YOUR STUDENTS:

I wrote this rubric to use with my high school Honors Biology juniors and seniors but it can be adapted for other levels and other subjects. Remove lines that do not match your teaching expectations. Change wording to make boxes clearer to your students. Add new rows for expectations that are not in the rubric.

WRITING YOUR OWN RUBRIC:

Rubrics are much easier to use than to write but writing your own rubric forces you to decide and to articulate what you think is important. To prepare for writing your rubric, first make a list of what are the important things (Thing l, Thing 2,Thing 3, etc.) you want your students to demonstrate that they understand or know how to do. Then decide what the qualities are for an excellent, good, and poor Thing 1. It may help you to select student papers that you had graded as A, B, C, etc. and study them to determine why you assigned those grades.

Hierarchical box rubrics should have 3 to 5 boxes in each row, and you can decide how many boxes is most appropriate for your use. If you choose to use three boxes you might name those boxes Excellent, Good, Poor, or something like Proficient, Achieving, and Not Acceptable. If you choose to use five boxes, it is not mandatory to have words in every box. The most important qualities of this type of rubric is that it should teach (What should I do?), describe (What is the difference between good and poor?), and evaluate (How well did I do it?).

More information on rubrics

QUESTIONS?

If you have any questions about creating your own rubric, adapting this rubric, teaching students or training co-teachers to use the rubric, please contact Lindy Eyster.

Woodrow Wilson Leadership Program in Environmental Science

lpt@www.woodrow.org
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation

webmaster@woodrow.org
CN 5281, Princeton NJ 08543-5281

Tel:(609)452-7007

Fax:(609)452-0066