Rubrics (e.g., Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) rubrics) that measure specific skills exist, and researchers have demonstrated their benefits; however, most of them were designed for use with undergraduate students. Although some rubrics have been created to assess dissertations and oral defenses, few have been…

Many colleges and universities now require faculty search committees to use rubrics when evaluating faculty job candidates, as proponents believe these "decision-support tools" can reduce the impact of bias in candidate evaluation. That is, rubrics are intended to ensure that candidates are evaluated more fairly, which is then thought to…

Rock and mineral labs are fundamental in traditional introductory geology courses. Successful implementation of these lab activities provides students opportunities to apply content knowledge. Inquiry-based instruction may be one way to increase student success. Prior examination of published STEM labs indicates that geology labs, particularly…

Generative artificial intelligence technologies, such as ChatGPT, bring an unprecedented change in education by leveraging the power of natural language processing and machine learning. Employing ChatGPT to assist with marking written assessment presents multiple advantages including scalability, improved consistency, eliminating biases associated…

Literature reviews are often used as part of teaching undergraduates about secondary research. The assignment, however, presents challenges for inexperienced researchers and writers and can be difficult for instructors to read and grade. This "quick fix" piece offers an alternative assignment to begin students in gaining secondary…

In this article, the author shares some tips for improving university-wide assessment conversations, focusing on meetings with faculty creating and doing assessment. The lessons are from a multi-year project where the author observed meetings and interviewed faculty about their involvement in university-wide assessment.

In design-oriented biomedical engineering courses, some instructors teach need-driven methods for health technology innovation that use a "need statement" to reflect a student team's hypothesis about the most fruitful direction for their project. While need statements are of the utmost importance to the projects, we were not aware of any…

Courses are the fundamental building blocks of educational programs, serving as a tangible representation of student attainment and the desired learning outcomes of the program. Despite their pivotal role in education, however, a standardized framework for the development, implementation, and enhancement of course specifications remains elusive.…

The objective for all three phases of this study was to make improvements to an existing measure, the Dispositional Evaluation Rubric (DER), and then establish reliability and validity of the measure, which will support schools and teacher preparation programs in measuring teacher candidates' professional dispositions. This study was designed to…

Aspiring teachers must develop an in-depth understanding of high-quality instructional practices. In order to prepare, instruct, and coach aspiring teachers, the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) has developed a the NIET Aspiring Teacher Rubric (ATR) based on principles of excellence in instruction. This research brief…

Objective: The objective of this study was threefold: (a) to create a rubric for response complexity (RC), defined as an admixture of response length, grammatical diversity, categorisation, and sophistication; (b) to measure behavioural and cognitive engagement through students' written responses on a school-based written activity, and (c) to…

The students' dominant language might influence how they use and process a rubric and its subsequent effect on task performance. However, our knowledge about these effects is limited. This study investigates how the dominant language of students is associated with their rubric reading patterns and their task performance in a written landscape…

This paper describes a project undertaken at Grand Valley State University in which a co-creative model was used to develop a rubric for assessing student learning in library instruction. It outlines the design process as well as the training and support provided throughout implementation. It concludes with the authors' reflections on the…

The claim has been made for decades that college teaching, like research, should be peer reviewed if we are to see it as a serious scholarly activity; yet peer review as a method of evaluating teaching is not widespread. Interest in peer review is increasing, however, as institutions have sought ways of evaluating teaching informed by professional…

Analysis of weekly peer-reviewed writing exercises in undergraduate introductory biology courses revealed that student improvement in ability to judge essays correlated with improvement in their own writing (n = 121 students). This correlation occurred across the spectrum of academic ability. The essays were scored by peers, self, and the…