How to Use Rubrics in Student Affairs Assessment

After re-tweeting a Faculty Focus article (http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/should-you-be-using-rubrics/) about rubrics the other day, I was asked by Kimberly Faith (@puzzler821) if rubrics can be used in student affairs to measure learning. My response: yes, we can use rubrics to assess learning in student affairs. In this post, I provide some thoughts on the uses and utility of rubrics as an assessment tool in student affairs, along with a few sources that can be useful in exploring rubrics further.

A lot of student affairs divisions and departments have been doing some great work in writing learning outcomes. We should definitely begin with learning outcomes, which help us answer the following question: what should a student learn/gain from an experience? These can often be very broad statements, even when written with specificity. There are generally specific elements that constitute a designed experience that lead to meeting a learning outcome. A rubric can serve as a tool to help specify those individual elements/experiences. 

One of the potential uses for rubrics in classroom settings was described in the Faculty Focus article in the following way: "When rubrics are given to students at the time an assignment is made, students can use them to better understand expectations for the assignment and then monitor and regulate their work." There's a pretty simple translation to student affairs practice. A big buzz word these days is transparency. We can make it very tangible instead of leaving it to buzz word status. By building rubrics that specify individual elements of experiences that lead to the realization of learning outcomes, and sharing them with students, we can be transparent about the outcomes of experiences, and the processes that lead to reaching those outcomes.

"Among students, there is agreement that rubrics clarify expectations and are especially useful as they prepare assignments." Imagine this quote from the Faculty Focus article in the context of student affairs: Rubrics clarify expectations and are especially useful to students as they engage in experiences that are designed to affect learning and development. The further clarify this point, the purpose of developing rubrics is to create them with the end user in mind: the student. We should use rubrics as tools to communicate expectations, but not necessarily what we would expect of students. We should use rubrics to communicate the ins and outs of the experiences students can expect to have from their engagement.

Rubrics offer students an opportunity to engage in self-assessment of their experiences. A common suggestion for using formative assessment in student affairs is the reflection paper. Reflecting on experiences can almost always be good practice. Imagine the depth of writing that could come out of reflection papers when rubrics have been shared with 

Like most things assessment, developing rubrics should not be solitary work by an individual. Collaboration is critical in assessment, and especially when it comes to developing learning outcomes and rubrics. Conversations about desired outcomes are critical, and should be a regular feature of staff meetings and chats by the coffee maker.

Now for the step by step process of getting started with rubrics . . .

Rather than duplicate some great information that is freely available on the internet, I am sharing links to some resources that I have found and that I share with my graduate-level course on student affairs assessment at LSU. There are two presentations that a number of student affairs divisions have posted on their websites. 

• The first is from Joseph Levy who works with Campus Labs: http://bit.ly/XO2Jf7
• The second presentation that comes up on several sites is from Dr. Carrie Zelna at North Carolina State University: http://bit.ly/15khZUw

Both presentation files provide easy to follow elements of rubrics and examples of use in student affairs.

Bonus use of rubrics . . . 

In addition to using rubrics for direct assessment of student learning and development, rubrics can be used in the assessment planning process. A division of student affairs might develop a rubric to serve as a guide to help individual departments and units develop their assessment plans, and then use the rubric to evaluate the completed plans. Examples of this use of rubrics in student affairs assessment can be found below. I provide these as examples, and encourage you to create something that fits your institution:

• University of Tennessee - http://web.utk.edu/~student/workshop_files/assessment_plan_rubric.pdf 
• University of California Merced - http://bit.ly/YeviP7

Rubrics don't represent a magic wand for assessment in student affairs. What they do represent is another tool we can use to assess student learning and development. Rubrics can help student affairs educators think about both student learning and development, and assessment in student affairs. While rubrics can be valuable tools, they only become valuable when we share them. And remember, developing rubrics, like our other assessment activities, need to be collaborative activities, which means we need to develop a culture of assessment in student affairs, but that's a topic for a future blog post.