A rubric is a practical tool for supporting learning, assessment, evaluation, and professional development. It provides a structured way to define and describe the key components of complex tasks and behaviours, helping teams or individuals reflect on performance and make informed judgments. While most commonly used in education, rubrics are increasingly being adapted for use in other sectors such as community development, natural resource management, and systems change. In these fields, they help bring clarity to reflection and decision-making, particularly in complex and evolving settings. Similar principles—such as using scaled criteria to assess quality—have long informed monitoring and evaluation in environmental and policy contexts, even if the term ‘rubric’ is less commonly used.
A brief introduction to rubrics can be found in the LfS post – Using rubrics to assess complex tasks and behaviors. The first set of links below includes examples from both my own practice and other contributors. Together they show how rubrics are being used in diverse ways—from reflective tools in collaborative projects to structured evaluation methods in large-scale programmes. The second set of links points to material recognising the long use of rubrics for simultaneously supporting learning, assessment and professional development in the education sector.
As the examples below show, rubrics can serve many functions—supporting shared understanding, encouraging reflection, guiding evaluation, or enhancing instruction. While their formats vary, their real strength lies in clarifying what matters, and making those expectations visible and discussable.
Emerging uses of rubrics in project planning, implementation and evaluation
Know your terms: holistic, analytic, and single-point rubrics
This widely shared 2017 blog post by Jennifer Gonzalez (Cult of Pedagogy) offers a clear and accessible introduction to the three main types of rubrics used in education and evaluation. It explains how holistic, analytic, and single-point rubrics differ in structure and use, and outlines the strengths and trade-offs of each. A useful primer for practitioners looking to choose or design rubrics that match their context—whether for feedback, reflection, or assessment.
Place-based engagement and impact tool
A good example of a single-point rubric for place-based initiatives, this tool helps teams reflect on progress across five domains: relationships, shared understanding, co-innovation, systems change, and impact. Developed for use in catchment (watershed) management, it supports collaborative sense-making and learning, rather than fixed scoring. It’s designed for use in complex, evolving contexts where shared reflection is key to adaptive action.
What does success look like? An indicative rubric for marine participatory processes
This 2021 paper examines participatory processes in Aotearoa New Zealand, asking, “What does success look like?” Erena le Heron, Will Allen and colleagues offer a rubric to guide these ongoing processes through formative evaluation. The rubric highlights that success criteria and phases are fluid and context-dependent. We consider “whose success” matters, noting that success is influenced by politics and power dynamics. We advocate for a self-defined, ongoing evaluation where participants create and debate the criteria, ensuring the process meets their needs. This approach frames success as co-created, rather than externally imposed.
Using rubrics to improve biosecurity surveillance and engagement
This 2018 open-access chapter by Will Allen and colleagues outlines an action research approach to the participatory development of rubrics as a design and assessment approach to improve surveillance systems in a biosecurity setting. They show how rubrics can provide a way for reaching a shared understanding of what matters, and how to assess that in terms of what can be confidently regarded as good practice—and equally what can be agreed on as emerging practice.
Different kinds of rubrics
This 2023 post explores the diverse ways rubrics can support evaluation and decision-making, drawing on real-world examples and reflective practice. Julian King distinguishes between different types of rubrics—such as evaluative, developmental, and dialogic—and highlights how each can enhance clarity, learning, and values-based judgment. The piece offers practical insights for evaluators, commissioners, and collaborators seeking to use rubrics not just for measurement, but to foster shared understanding in complex contexts.
Rubrics methodology in detail: Supporting outcome assessment in complex social change programmes
This 2025 paper by Davidson, Chianca, Dulieu, and Sigdel describes how Save the Children developed and applied multi-point rubrics to assess outcomes like inclusion and discrimination across diverse programme sites. It offers a detailed example of rubrics used for structured, values-based evaluation, including co-developed subcriteria and rating guides.
To rubrics or not to rubrics? An experience using rubrics for monitoring, evaluating and learning in a complex project
In this Practice Note, Samantha Stone-Jovicich shares her experience using an evaluation and monitoring approach called ‘rubrics’ to assess a complex and dynamic project’s progress towards achieving its objectives. Rubrics are a method for aggregating qualitative performance data for reporting and learning purposes.
Bridging disciplines, knowledge systems and cultures in pest management
This 2013 paper by Will Allen, Shaun Ogilvie, Helen Blackie and colleagues describes how their research team with a range of disciplinary and stakeholder expertise was able to use rubrics in an action research based approach to critically reflect on their engagement practice and identify lessons around how to collaborate more effectively. They discuss the implications of these experiences for other researchers and managers seeking to improve engagement and collaboration in integrated science, management and policy initiatives.
Evaluative rubrics: a method for surfacing values and improving the credibility of evaluation
This practice-based 2013 paper by Julian King and colleagues unpacks the learnings of a group of evaluators who have used rubrics to help make judgments about performance, quality, and effectiveness. They have found that while evaluative rubrics look beguilingly simple they are hard to do well. However, when done well, the use of this tool can substantially increase the use and credibility of evaluation.
Selected rubric presentations and briefs: The rubric revolution. (Jane Davidson, Nan Wehipeihana, Kate McKegg 2011); Rubrics – an assessment tool for the urban biosecurity toolkit (Will Allen, Andrea Grant, Lynsey Earl 2017).
Rubrics: a history of use in the education sector
Rubrics: sharing the rules of the game
This useful 2016 paper by David Balch and Robert Blanck summarise the evolutionary uses of rubrics within the tertiary educational environment. They describe holistic, analytic (and developmental), and single-point rubrics. They provide a checklist for measuring the qualities of good rubric. They also review the incorporation over time of different goals, objectives and learning outcomes of rubrics in this setting.
What Are Rubrics and Why Are They Important?
This 2013 chapter by Susan Brookhart describes the different types of rubrics – holistic, analytic, general, or task specific. Rubrics are defined in terms of their two main components: criteria and descriptions of levels of performance. The main point about criteria is that they should be about learning outcomes, not aspects of the task itself. The main point about descriptions of levels of performance is that they should be descriptions, not evaluative statements. The “evaluation” aspect of assessment is accomplished by matching student work with the description, not by making immediate judgments.
Teaching With Rubrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
This 2010 paper by Heidi Andrade gives a brief overview of the structure and purposes of rubrics; reviews the benefits of using rubrics as both teaching and grading tools; warns against approaches that limit the effectiveness of rubrics; and urges instructors to take simple steps toward ensuring the validity, reliability, and fairness of their rubrics. Tips for using rubrics with undergraduate and graduate students are also included.
Rubrics: Tools for making learning goals and evaluation criteria explicit for both teachers and learners
This 2006 paper by Deborah Allen and Kimberly Tanner highlights the benefit of rubrics as teaching and professional development tools. Used wisely, rubrics not only make the instructor’s standards and resulting grading explicit, but they can give students a clear sense of what the expectations are for a high level of performance on a given assignment, and how they can be met. This use of rubrics can be most important when those undertaking the activity to be assessed are novices with respect to a particular task or type of expression. Finally, they remind us that by their very nature, rubrics encourage reflective practice on the part of both students and teachers.
Using rubrics to promote thinking and learning
This 2000 paper by Heidi Andrade highlights that instructional rubrics help teachers teach as well as evaluate student work. She reminds us that creating rubrics with your students can be powerfully instructive. Rubrics make assessing student work quick and efficient, and they help teachers justify to parents and others the grades that they assign to students. At their very best, rubrics are also teaching tools that support student learning and the development of sophisticated thinking skills. When used correctly, they serve the purposes of learning as well as of evaluation and accountability. Like portfolios, exhibitions, and other authentic approaches to assessment, rubrics blur the distinction between instruction and assessment.
What’s wrong – and what’s right – with rubrics
In this 1997 paper James Popham emphasises that rubrics have the potential to make enormous contributions to instruction quality – but first we have to correct the flaws that make many rubrics almost worthless. He notes that we have to abandon both overly task-specific and excessively general rubrics, and strive to end up with rubrics that actually and practically help instruction.