Towards Engaging Students in Curriculum Transformation: What are the Effective Characteristics of Rubrics?

Abstract

Rubrics are tools commonly used by educators to accurately and consistently mark student assessments and communicate achieved learning outcomes. The teachers, having a clear understanding of the assessment's intended learning outcomes, have traditionally constructed rubrics; however, an enhanced shared understanding of an assessment’s outcomes has the potential to be achieved if rubrics are developed as a collaboration between staff and students. Such practices provide potential for assessment, and its subsequent feedback, to be more highly valued by students not simply as an end-point, but rather as an opportunity for them to be active in their own learning, this becoming a curriculum transformation. This paper reports on the first phase of a project, funded by an Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) Innovation and Discovery Grant: Owning the rubric: Student engagement in rubric design, use and moderation. Phase 1 of the project involved the identification of Effective Rubric Characteristics (ERCs) through a literature-evidenced approach that subsequently informed the formation of an Effective Rubrics Characteristics Questionnaire (ERCQ). The ERCQ was piloted with a small group of experienced users and then it was administered to a group of assessment and rubric experts to establish the key attributes of effective rubrics using a modified Delphi technique.