A general or generic rubric is a basic scoring tool that teachers can apply to many different assignments or grading situations. Instead of creating numeric values for specific tasks or parts of an item to be scored, a generic rubric easily conforms to almost any grading situation. Although generic rubrics by nature have a broad focus, teachers may create them within one specific subject. For example, you can create a language learning assessment that includes scores for comprehension, use or vocabulary, but does not assess specific assignment tasks, such as demonstrating understand of a certain chapter in a textbook or using designated vocabulary words.
A task-specific rubric includes scoring assessments related to a particular assignment, test or other classroom activity. These tools focus on the learning goals and objectives for the lesson. For example, if you are teaching a lesson on countries in Europe and the assignment is a research report on a selected country or city, the task-specific rubric may contain items relating to the culture, monuments or places, an accurate historical timeline or demonstrating knowledge of well-known people from the country.
A holistic rubric is exactly as it sounds: a way to rate the overall (or whole) performance on a task or assignment. Teachers commonly use a total of between four and six categories or performance levels to score students. The performance level criteria may be general or specifically related to a task. For example, a holistic rubric may include scores for expectations, such as exceeding, meets, beginning or not developed yet, letters (such as A, B, C, D) that correlate to scores of excellent, good, fair or poor, or other similar categories. These rubrics tend to examine what the student can do and not what they can't, and may include little detail.
Analytic rubrics provide information on both the student's strengths and weaknesses by assessing a number of different assignment or task-related criteria. For each criteria, a number or rating is assigned. For example, a criterion for an art project might be to use multiple materials in a multi-media project. A high score of three points might be given to students who demonstrate the clear use of more than three materials, two points to students who used at least two, one for the correct use of one material and a zero for non-completion or non-use.