The effects of rubrics on evaluative judgement: a randomised controlled experiment

Abstract

Rubrics have been suggested as a means to foster students’ evaluative judgement, the capacity to appraise their own work and that of others; however, empirical evidence of rubrics’ effectiveness is still emerging. This paper contributes findings from a randomised controlled experiment on the effect of rubrics on evaluative judgement. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: a control group which evaluated peer-authored learning resources without the use of a rubric and an experiment group which carried out the evaluation using a three-item rubric based on (1) alignment with course content, (2) accuracy and (3) clarity. Both groups were asked to rate their confidence and provide comments to justify their scoring. The results showed a small effect size in increasing average agreement on the quality of learning resources in the experiment group. Analysis of comments reveals that criteria in and beyond the rubric guided participants’ ratings of quality. The study provides evidence of the impact of rubrics on students’ evaluative judgement and an example of how data-driven approaches and learning analytics can inform actionable design choices for embedding pedagogically supported strategies derived from the literature into actively operating educational technologies.