RUBRICS

Here’s a thorough discussion about approaching rubrics from a WAC/WID perspective, with examples from various disciplines: http://wac.sfsu.edu/content/rubrics 

Harvard’s Project Zero presents two studies on the effect of instructional rubrics and rubric-referenced self-assessment on the development of 7th and 8th grade students’ writing skills and their understandings of the qualities of good writing; its findings are transferable to a college setting:  http://www.pz.gse.harvard.edu/rubrics.php

Sample rubrics

• A five-tier rubric organized around eight objectives: addresses assignment, claim, organization, evidence & research, style, audience, grammar & usage, revision:  http://www.stjohns.edu/academics/centers/iws/firstyear/rubrics
  
• A full packet of rubrics (scanned as PDFs) organized into “holistic rubrics” (which assign an essay to an overall scoring category based on its dominant characteristics) and “analytic rubrics” (which evaluate the writer’s success with individual elements of the assignment): http://humboldt.edu/assessment/resources/allen/rubrics_writing_examples_f07_Allen.pdf

Using rubrics to manage and evaluate student blog posts

• Here’s one post about using rubrics with blogging assignments: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196.  The primary example is from a graduate-level course, but there are links to a number of other rubrics in the comments on the article.
• This article is more geared toward using blogs in an undergrad course and offers some sound advice about managing student posts over the course of a semester (e.g. giving them a chance to go back and revise one or two posts, especially ones that might be building blocks for a paper).
• This post on Mark Sample’s blog offers a grading scale of 1 to 4.