Collaborative Rubric Development for Program Improvement

Arts, Humanities & Languages, Poster Exhibit
This poster is going to present how faculty in the Academy for Creative Media undergraduate program utilized an efficient and collaborative process of rubrics development for program assessment that led to program improvement. The Academy for Creative Media undergraduate program has three tracks: Cinematic Digital Production, Critical Studies, and Animation. After developing program SLOs and the curriculum map, the faculty felt the need to develop rubrics for each track to evaluate student learning products. Accordingly, the faculty broke up into sub-groups using examples of exemplary student work from each track to discuss the reasons these works were excellent. These ideas helped the faculty develop descriptions of excellent work for each track’s rubric. The faculty from the Animation and Critical Studies tracks also developed descriptors of other levels of work (e.g., good, average, poor). The process took three department meetings’ time with one hour each.

This poster is going to present how faculty in the Academy for Creative Media undergraduate program utilized an efficient and collaborative process of rubrics development for program assessment that led to program improvement. The Academy for Creative Media undergraduate program has three tracks: Cinematic Digital Production, Critical Studies, and Animation. After developing program SLOs and the curriculum map, the faculty felt the need to develop rubrics for each track to evaluate student learning products. Accordingly, the faculty broke up into sub-groups using examples of exemplary student work from each track to discuss the reasons these works were excellent.  These ideas helped the faculty develop descriptions of excellent work for each track’s rubric. The faculty from the Animation and Critical Studies tracks also developed descriptors of other levels of work (e.g., good, average, poor). The process took three department meetings’ time with one hour each.

The collaborative rubric development process has been efficient and effective for the reasons below:

  1. Evaluating student work using clear categories makes grading student work more objective.
  2. Such rubrics help faculty who teach similar courses adopt consistent expectations of the levels of work,
  3. The process stimulated discussions of curriculum alignment and improvement. Faculty addressed specific questions regarding our the program’s current ability to address each SLO, and what courses should be added to help address these issues.

The faculty’s work on program assessment set the initiative of program improvement in motion. By Joel Moffett, Dan Boulos, Anne Misawa

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Recommended Citation:
Moffett, J., Boulos, D., Misawa, A. (2014, April). Collaborative Rubric Development for Program Improvement. Poster session presented at the Assessment for Curricular Improvement Poster Exhibit at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI.