Grading Groups: Developing a Rubric for Evaluating Discussion

Abstract

How learning outcomes are assessed in any course is of key importance. Clear guidelines help both learners and instructors to understand what is expected in a course, and administrators to ensure that standards are being maintained. These assessment procedures must be fair, appropriate to course content, and practical to implement for instructors. This is especially true in situations where multiple instructors teach a course. It is also essential to examine how well current methods of assessment are fulfilling their roles. In this paper, I examine how well the current assessment criteria in the Academic Discourse course evaluate the skills the course aims to develop. I argue that the current system can be improved by incorporating more specific criteria that should promote learning-oriented assessment (Carless, 2007), enhance the development of interactional competence (Galaczi & Taylor, 2018), and facilitate more consistent evaluation between different instructors.