Practical things to try

In this video I’ll review two related practical activities designed for different audiences, faculty versus students. If you’re introducing a VALUE rubric to faculty or students, consider engaging them with thoughtful discussion. Dissect and converse about the rubric of focus. So with faculty, like when you’re introducing the rubric to your department or maybe another group, closely read through each dimension, perhaps with faculty divided into small groups or pairs. After a close review, ask the faculty to discuss warm and cool feedback and share the feedback to the larger group. Identify particularly salient aspects of the rubric and provide a context in which they might be used or implemented.

At the end, maybe discuss potential uses and assignments that could align with the rubric as a whole and its learning outcome. This activity can also be implemented with students as participants like when an instructor intends to use the rubric in a college course and is preparing students for an assignment. As with faculty, ask students to closely read through each dimension of rubric in small groups or pairs. And when doing so, identifying language and sections that may be confusing or need to be clarified would be important. Discuss these questions as a whole group and together you can co-create a group understanding of the rubric.

This activity is focused on modifying a value rubric for use in a specific context which could be done following the discussion noted in the previous video or as a standalone activity. Of course, there’s a good reason to use rubrics as written when considering validity and reliability, for instance but faculty can absolutely modify the rubrics to meet their specific needs, like when using it for a course assignment or programmatic needs. You might want to modify a rubric by adjusting the formatting, like adding or removing performance levels to meet your needs. Changing performance level labels and or slicing and dicing rubric dimensions from one or more rubrics. In my personal experience, I found it helpful to pull relevant dimensions from several rubrics when designing rubrics for use at the class level. We have intentionally selected asset, asset based language for the performance levels spanning Capstone to Benchmark. However, faculty may prefer different language that aligns more closely with the course, program or the institution’s mission.

Finally, VALUE rubrics are analytic rubrics that were not intended to be used for grading purposes. As such, they can be modified to be used for grading specific assignments. And two ways to do this are by retaining some of the content of the rubric, but altering the rubric type into a single point or a holistic rubric. For example, to transform into a single point rubric select the performance descriptors at each relevant dimension that represent the level of proficiency you expect to see in your student’s work. Given the course content assignment expectations whether it’s a formative or summative assessment the assignment objectives and so on. Those performance descriptors become the rubric all listed in a single column. You may decide that only four of the dimensions are relevant, for example and the performance descriptors you select for each dimension may be at different performance levels.