With my return to the U.S. school system this year, after being overseas for 11 yrs and a stay at home mom for 2 yrs, I have been inundated with rubric requirements and requests. I teach high school science and at my current school (private independent) the students have become so dependent on getting rubrics that they can not think for themselves about what they need to do to complete simple assignments.
For example, I had my grade 9 biology students make a poster, the directions stated: put your photos in order, label them and give a description of the phase that they show. (we were talking about cellular reproduction)
There was such uproar that I didn't give a rubric it was amazing! Parents of the students insisted that my directions were unclear and that if I had given a rubric they would have done better etc etc etc. However, my response was, the rubric would have included no more information than the directions: put the photos in order, label them, describe each phase.
So, I think that in cases where there is a lot of detail and parts to an assignment they are useful teaching/assessing tools, but I am not a huge fan of them because the students become so dependent on them that they can't decide for themselves what would make an assignment good any longer without them.
