Twenty years ago, many faculty didn't know what rubrics were, but today they are well known and widely used, both in practice and research. And like many other instructional innovations, they have come to be used and defined differently. Dawson (2017) aspires to sort through these definitional vagrancies and explains that “Rubrics are evaluated, mandated, embraced and resisted based on often imprecise and inconsistent understandings of the term” (p. 347).
