When assigning a Guided Essay or Short Response assignment, teachers can customize the assignment's rubric by choosing from rubric items created by NoRedInk, and/or by adding their own custom criteria. We recommend that when selecting rubric items, teachers assign 5-7 at once to help students focus while writing.
To customize a Guided Essay or Short Response rubric, you can follow these steps:
- Choose either a Guided Essay or a Guided Short Response assignment.
- After choosing the assignment type, the rubric will appear on the right-hand side of the screen. Select Customize to begin making adjustments.
❓Looking to customize an assignment you've already created? Select the Edit (pencil) icon next to the assignment on your My Assignments page.
After selecting Customize, a pop-up will appear that allows you to adjust the rubric settings. On that pop-up, you can preview rubric items, select items, add custom criteria, and customize the rubric scale.
Check out the sections below to learn how to customize each part of the rubric!
Previewing and selecting rubric items
The default rubric items for this essay type will be selected at first, and you can choose to deselect these criteria and/or add additional items. You can view more information on an individual criterion by hovering your cursor over the question mark icon to the right.
You can also view the lessons and examples students will see alongside each NoRedInk rubric item by selecting the paper icon.
You can remove existing criteria by deselecting the checkboxes to the left of the rubric item. You can also choose unselected options by selecting the same checkbox.
Select Save changes at the bottom of the window to confirm your changes, or select the X in the top right corner to remove any changes made.
Adding custom rubric criteria
In addition to the pre-built rubric items provided by NoRedInk, you can choose to include your custom criteria! To add custom criteria to your rubric, scroll to the bottom of the rubric items and select Add criterion.
You'll then be able to give each criterion a name and description that will be visible to your students. To add more criteria, select Add another.
Once you are finished, select Save changes at the bottom of the window, or select the X in the top right-hand corner to discard any changes made.
At the moment, custom rubrics do not save between assignments. You'll need to add in your custom criteria for each new Guided writing assignment.
Customizing the rubric scale
You can also customize the grading scale for each individual rubric item on a Guided writing assignment. To customize your rubric scale, select the Edit (pencil) icon next to a rubric item.
The dropdown menus shown above will allow you to set your rubric scale to any range between 0-10. You can choose to apply your custom scale to all rubric items or set a different scale for each criterion by selecting the toggle shown below.
After selecting the rubric scale, select Save Changes at the bottom of the window to confirm your changes.