Assessment Rubrics Teaching Resources

Simplify your grading with printable assessment rubrics designed for elementary teachers, by elementary teachers. This collection of rubrics covers a host of common assignments and provides both you and your students with clear ways to measure quality of their work.

New to using this teaching tool? Here's a quick primer from the Teach Starter teacher team!

What Is an Assessment Rubric?

Put simply, an assessment rubric is a tool teachers can use to evaluate and grade student work or performance. Providing a set of criteria and standards you can use to measure the quality of a student's work or performance, rubrics typically include descriptions of different levels of performance — "excellent," "good," "fair," and "poor," for example — and specify the criteria that will be used to evaluate the work or performance.

You can use rubrics for a wide range of assessments from written essays to oral presentations, group projects, and more.

Why Should Teachers Use Rubrics?

We certainly don't recommend using rubrics for every single thing students do in your classroom, but this assessment tool could prove useful when you're looking to grade student work! Consider these benefits:

1. You can use the criteria and standards specified in the rubric to measure the quality of the student's work or performance. This is the most basic usage.
2. Rubrics spell out clear expectations for what a student's work should look like at different levels of performance.
3. A rubric can help you identify areas where individual students need improvement.
4. You can use rubrics to provide detailed and specific feedback to students.
5. You can use rubrics to communicate grading criteria to your students before an assignment is due, so they fully understand the expectations of the assignment.
6. Rubrics can also be used to inform instruction, allowing you to identify where your students are struggling and adjust instruction to better meet their needs.