In traditional education, the rubric—the list of criteria used for grading—often felt like a secret key revealed only when the assignment was complete and the teacher was passing judgment. Today, technology is enabling a more dynamic process where the rubric becomes a live tool for construction, a concept best defined as Criterion-Driven Iteration (CDI). CDI is the systematic and cyclical process where students repeatedly apply the formal assessment criteria (the rubric) to their own ongoing work and the work of their peers, transforming the criteria from a retrospective judgment tool into a prospective guide for development.
The core of CDI is a subtle but profound shift in purpose. When a teacher uses a rubric at the end of a project, the feedback is definitive and retrospective, explaining why a certain grade was earned. In CDI, students and their classmates use that exact same rubric in the middle of the project to suggest improvements. This changes the language of assessment from "You missed this point" to "To achieve the highest score, your next draft needs more evidence of this concept." This prospective phrasing is inherently constructive and is fundamentally about learning, not just scoring.
A prime example is the classic "Volcanoes Project." Instead of submitting a final report after three weeks, a student first submits a rough draft to a digital peer review platform. Using the teacher’s rubric—which specifies criteria like “Accuracy of Geological Concepts” and “Clarity of Structure”—another student provides a score and a written critique. The system then cycles this feedback back to the original author, who performs a self-assessment on the revised draft against the same rubric. This environment, supported by digital platforms, replaces the risk of cheating (plagiarism) with social pressure for honesty, as students must explicitly justify why they accepted or rejected peer advice. The final submission is therefore not just an artifact of memory, but a documented journey of critical thinking and revision, making the artifact itself evidence of higher-level cognitive practice. This continuous, criterion-driven loop ensures students are actively engaging with the standards of quality before the final grade is ever assigned.
References
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112.
Wiggins, G. (1998). Educative assessment: Designing assessments to inform and improve student performance. Jossey-Bass.