Scoring Rubric for Performance Task: To College or Not To College, That is the Question

Essential Skill or Knowledge / Entry / Developing / Approaching / Ideal / Comments / Score
Research & Information Fluency / Students may acquire limited information from provided materials combined with opinion; some information may be inaccurately used or lack strong authority. / Students use some techniques to determine the authority of information and to conduct some analysis of the provided information; opinion, when used, is supported by some connection to content knowledge. / Students generate valid questions to guide their research and to determine the authority of information; they use some variety of digital tools to assemble and organize given information to support their position. / Students use expert strategies to analyze information and guide their own research; they use a variety of digital tools and media to assemble and synthesize information to form a powerful response to the situation that contains aspects of personal relevancy.
Communication & Collaboration / Students do not consider the positions of others and do not seek help, whether in the classroom or from appropriate communities beyond the classroom. / Students follow defined roles to create assignments that may be accurate but that communicate little unique information or have limited relevance beyond the scope of the class. / Students demonstrate some control control of their own learning and navigate between different roles to meet the demands of the task (researcher, editor, reporter, etc.); they use appropriate digital tools to collaborate, when allowed, but do generate products that communicate to relevant communities. / Students use appropriate digital tools to collaborate with others, when allowed, and to create information that has relevance beyond the classroom to appropriate communities; they reflect on their roles as communicators, evaluate the effectiveness of their selected strategies, and determine how the experience might impact their performance in the future.
Critical Thinking & Problem Solving / Students complete assignments using opinion, personal experience, or basic recollection of factual information with little justification for their position or reasoning. / Students may move beyond incorporating basic factual recall and can respond to requests for justification when prompted; they use digital tools to support their thinking and problem solving strategies in a limited way. / Students generate purposeful questions to guide their work, identify the problem, and take steps to justify the decisions they’ve made and their problem-solving strategies; they use digital tools to support higher levels of critical thinking and as resources for solving complex problems. / Students demonstrate expert problem generation and solving strategies that allow them to provide innovative solutions to complex problems; they use digital tools to generate authentic solutions that require high levels of critical thinking; they reflect on their roles as critical thinkers, evaluating their strategies; and posing options for future growth.
Creativity & Innovation / Students follow teacher directions or prompts with little variation and limited or no original outcomes. / Students express some original choice during the activity and use some technology to explore new ideas, including generating questions or predictions. / Students analyze trends in information and make predictions that may be novel--to them or others--that result in meaningful work with appropriate digital tools within the parameters of the assignment. / Students synthesize existing and self-generated knowledge to make sophisticated predictions the extend beyond the parameters of the assignment; They take risks to test hypotheses and potential innovative solutions and reflect on their own creative process and consider how the experience can inform their performance in the future.

2012 by John D. Ross, Ph.D. TeachLearnTech.com.You can use, remix, and build upon this work for non-commercial purposes as long as you give me credit and license your new creations under these same terms. The categories for this rubric were developed by Henrico County Public Schools, VA.