Applying a Versatile Rubric for Authentic Research Assignments: An Easier and More Reliable Way to Give Feedback to Students?

 

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2014, Volume 35

Doug Graber Neufeld, Steve Cessna, & Tara Kishbaugh

Abstract

Rubrics have gained popularity as a means to give accurate and timely assessment feedback to students, and as a way to help standardize responses between instructors. Although various rubrics have been developed, often these are specific to a particular discipline and/or type of assignment, and usually do not focus on broader skills of critical thinking and understanding the nature of science. There is increasing recognition that effectively teaching scientific literacy requires a focus on these broader, transferrable goals. Developing authentic research experiences is a common strategy for teaching students how to "do science". While such experiences, either within classes or as additional independent components of the curriculum, are recognized as critical learning opportunities, they do present challenges. They are typically time-intensive endeavors for faculty, and need to be coupled with timely and quality feedback in order to effectively translate the experience into learning gains. This workshop introduces a versatile rubric bank that was developed to assess three non-content aspects of authentic research assignments: higher order cognitive skills, the understanding of the nature of science and scientific inquiry, and the establishment of oral and written communication skills. This rubric was developed to facilitate grading of a variety of assignment types, at different developmental levels, and for different science courses. The rubric bank demonstrated in this workshop consists of individual assessment items from each of three areas: higher order cognitive skills (HOCS), communication skills, and the nature of science (NOS). Examples of rubric bank items are shown in Table 1. The full version of the rubric bank is available at http://www.emu.edu/interdisciplinary-studies/national-science-foundation-grant/. In addition, a full description of the development and implementation of this rubric has been published (Kishbaugh et al., 2012 and Cessna et al. 2013) describe an example of a course for which the rubric bank was used. This project identified several advantages and disadvantages of the use of rubrics for grading. Rubric use clearly carries the potential for facilitating the speed and ease of grading, particularly when a course is large or has many associated assignments. Rubrics can outline more clearly the expectations for a course assignment. When used in multiple classes across the curriculum, the rubric bank helped to align expectations of different faculty, both clarifying departmental learning goals and reducing student anxiety and confusion about variable expectations in different classes. On the other hand, the use of rubrics can foster a sense that the goal of an assignment is to meet faculty expectations (i.e. "do what is needed to get a good grade"), rather than recognizing that the goal is to increase learning per se. Faculty also recognized that it reduces the amount of personalized feedback on assignments. The rubric bank in this workshop recognizes these advantages and disadvantages represent tradeoffs.

Keywords:  rubrics

University of Calgary (2013)