Does a well-defined scoring rubric lead to an improvement in student results?

In order to achieve an accurate and reliable measurement of students' performance in a subject, good quality assessment and evaluation tools must be used. One such tool is a detailed and well-defined rubric (Arter & McTighe, 2001). A rubric is a clear and unambiguous indication of what is expected of students in order to achieve the various grade levels for a piece of assessment (Rubrics, 2012; Moskal, 2000). Rubrics are often used to aid academics in measuring the ability of students to use and apply factual, conceptual and procedural knowledge (Bloom, 1956; Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Littlefair (2008) has presented work on the use of rubrics to identify the key areas of assessment and has shown these methods to reduce the impact of subjectiveness in the marking of engineering projects. The focus of this project is to investigate the effect on student results of providing a detailed, well-defined marking rubric in a final year design and development project subject. Over a decade (2003-2013) a final year design and development project subject has been run with the aim of allowing students to showcase the knowledge gained throughout their course and their ability to communicate via the three fundamental modes; oral, visual and written. In 2008 a well-defined scoring rubric was developed to make the marking requirements for the students' clearer and ensure consistent marking amongst the different academics. The research question is evaluated both by comparing the results of the student cohorts who used the rubric and those who did not. An anonymous survey was conducted to determine if the students actually used the rubric in completing their required tasks. The comparison of results for the students' performance in both assessment components before and after the rubric do not differ significantly as the trend lines for both sets of graphs are very close to flat which indicates very little variation between the results before and after the rubric was introduced. The student survey results reveal that 92% of the students are aware of the scoring rubric for the poster and report requirement for this subject. 82% of the students used the rubric when creating their poster and 87% used the rubric when writing their report. Of the students who used the rubric, 69% believed it to be a well-defined rubric. The results indicate that the use of a scoring rubric has not greatly impacted on the subject average results of the poster and design report components over the 10 years of results. However, a positive outcome is that a very high proportion of students have used the rubric.