Influence of Using Rubrics in Higher Education on Students’ Performance and Academic Motivation

Abstract

Introduction. The relevance of the chosen topic is justified by the need for further discussion on the problem of ensuring an objective and transparent assessment of students’ work. It is also necessary to develop and test formative assessment tools that allow students to improve their academic performance and interest in learning. Rubrics are offered as one such tool. They are a matrix of criteria or attributes for evaluating a specific task and compliance levels.Purpose. The study aimed to determine how the application of rubrics to assess the tasks performed by students affects their academic performance and motivation to study.Materials and Methods. The methodology of the study is based on a questioning of students and an experiment involving the joint development and further application of rubrics with students to evaluate the completed task on the subject.Results. The results obtained confirm the hypothesis that rubrics application facilitates an increase in students’ motivation to study and academic performance. In addition, the assessment using rubrics allows students to receive feedback from the teacher in the form of comments on the achievement of compliance levels for the assessment attributes used. The use of rubrics helped to increase the activity of students in the classroom and to show more interest in scientific literature, including in a foreign language.Discussion and Conclusion. Comparison of the results obtained with existing works in the field of application of rubrics confirms their effectiveness, achieved using understandable assessment criteria. Rubrics seem to be a promising tool for assessing the most significant and complex tasks in the subject since their application facilitates an increase in the interest and satisfaction of students, together with the subsequence and impartiality of the assessment. One of the rubrics’ limitations is some suppression of the students’ pursuit to fulfil their creative potential, which needs to be worked out in further research.