How to Create a Rubric to Assess Student Videos

Let’s say you want to have students create videos for your class. Your students already use technology, and working a video maker like Animoto into class will keep students engaged and vary your instruction. But what do you do when it comes to grading students’ video projects?

One of the easiest ways to show students what’s expected of them is to create a rubric breaking down the different elements of a video project. If you’re not sure exactly what a rubric for a video project should look like, we’ve created a sample to help orient you.

You may have already created rubrics for other class projects — ones that involved posters, labs, or group work. Rubrics for video projects are similar. The medium may be different, but the learning and thinking students do are still there for you to assess.

Ways to assess a video:

While you can use video projects at many different levels, some of the elements in your rubric are going to be the same, whether you’re assigning a video to a high school physics class or using Animoto for a fourth grade vocabulary project.

Here are some things to include when developing a video project rubric:

• Content: Clearly state what information and how much of it students should include. For example, in a biography project, students might be expected to include five interesting facts about their person in order to get the highest number of points on the rubric.
  
• Images: Make sure your rubric states how many images you expect in an excellent, good, average, and poor project. You might want to add that those images should be relevant to the topic (e.g. no skateboards in a butterfly video) and appropriate. If you want to emphasize research skills, you could also require they use public domain images or cite their image sources.
  
• Sources While this may not be necessary for very young students, middle and high school student videos can and should include a text slide with their bibliography or an accompanying paper bibliography.
  
• Length: Just as you would set a page limit for an essay, you should set limits on video length, especially if you want to share the videos with the class. That length depends on your project — a simple “About Me” video project can be a minute long, while a more involved science or English assignment could be two to three minutes.

While you can assess the style and flair of the video itself, that should really take second place to the student’s process — how a student researched the project, chose images, and organized their information. When your rubric reflects that, you’re truly assessing what a student learned.

How are you grading your students’ Animoto videos? Let us know in the comments below, or message us on Facebook or Twitter.