Create a Lab Report Rubric using RubiStar

Rubrics have become common in high school assessments, especially in the humanities. In addition to using them as a less subjective alternative to assigning grades, they also convey to the students what is expected of their work. I see this second function as a more beneficial use of rubrics.

I signed on to RubiStar and created a rubric for a science lab report. I have expended a great deal of time and effort to teach my students was a proper lab report should contain. Unfortunately I see time and time again that they have not learned what I have tried to teach them! Hopefully this rubric will help.

RubiStar is straight forward and intuitive. I saved the lab report rubric and a rubric about simple graphing on the Rubistar permanent storage so I can retrieve them later. There are several ways to output the finished rubric and I played around until I was satisfied that the regular Excel was the best way to go. I retrieved my lab report rubric from their storage and saved it as an Excel file to my home computer. I then uploaded it into GDocs and published it (Share, with everyone, view but not edit). It appeared to be saved into Google spreadsheets. You can see it here.

I was not happy with the Excel format that the rubric was displayed in, so I copied and pasted the rubric into Word, edited it and uploaded it to GDocs. I will probably use this version to show my students.