Community conversation about assessment criteria

This is one in a series of posts of material being prepared for presentation for the AAC&U conference in January 2009.

In July we postulated a new type of grade book that would have more potential for learners and the community of practice to converse about both the learner’s work and the importance of the assessment criteria within the community. In our pilot course using the grade book this semester, each time a rater provided feedback with the rubric, for each dimension of the rubric the rater also indicated their perception of the importance of the dimension on a six-point scale. Our observation, for all groups, was that they increased their appreciation of the value of each rubric dimension, and that as a group, the range in the ratings narrowed. The figure below is representative of the change.

Figure 1. Change in industry raters’ perception (N=6) of the value of rubric dimension 3 (OWN perspective, hypothesis or position is developed and communicated) over the course of the semester.

These changes were brought about through the use of the rubric to assess student work, and not by any conversation about the value of the rubric outside of its immediate application. We imagine that a community of practice would want to develop more explicit mechanisms to talk about, norm on, and refine rubrics as the community gained more experience with the tool.