While not limited to collaborative learning situations, rubrics are particularly suited to evaluating the types of learning products typically created in the course of collaborative learning. Rubrics are structured lists of criteria for evaluating a piece of work created by students. They are typically used in a transparant manner - e.g. co-developed by and made available to students at the start of a project rather than simply used at the end by an evaluator.

Starting points

• The Authentic Assessment Toolbox is a very useful resource - in terms of theoretical issues, but especially for practical how-to advice.
• Rubrics, scoring and grading contains many pointers to good assessment practice, including (towards the bottom of the page) a rubric for collaborative learning.

Rubric tools

• Rubistar is a free online service for creating printable rubrics by choosing options from drop-down lists. Aimed mainly at school-level teaching, but much of it useful for university teaching as well.
• Teach-nology has a collection of free online rubric creators - quite heavily skewed towards the school context.