Direct evidence, because it involves actual student performance on a specific assignment, requires scoring. Scoring a multiple choice test is straight forward, although interpretation of results can be more complex. Scoring assignments such as projects, papers, performances or presentations, is much more complex. In these instances, using a scoring guide (rubric) provide more “accurate, unbiased and consistent scoring” (Suskie, 2009). See Using Rubrics to Facilitate Program Assessment. Once you have developed the rubric, it can be used by multiple faculty members to score student work consistently. You may opt to score all student projects, or only a subset of them.
See additional rubric resources and the example below.
Activity
Feel free to submit a rubric to the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence for review at assess@psu.edu.
Assessing a psychology program – a rubric for scoring
If the psychology faculty want to use the research paper assignment from the Fear and Stress course, they’ll need a rubric. The rubric could be developed by the faculty member teaching the course, but it might need to be modified for use at the program level. This rubric for the psychology research paper shows the dimensions of interest to the department. The faculty member would have included a dimension to reflect definitions of stress, but that dimension is left out of this rubric because it is specific to the course. The rubric also includes a writing dimension. This dimension may be included because communicating in writing is a learning objective for most all programs.