Develop Program Learning Outcome Rubrics
Developing Program Learning Outcome Rubrics
Learning outcome rubrics are a scoring scale used to assess student performance along a set of performance indicators relative to a specific learning outcome. Learning outcome rubrics facilitate a shared understanding and approach across faculty and staff who teach and assess student learning for a given learning outcome.
Learning outcome rubrics have multiple benefits for both teaching and learning assessment:
- A learning outcome rubric provides a consistent way to interpret what is essential for student learning. This consistency is important when multiple faculty / staff help to teach and / or assess a learning outcome, and when faculty / staff change over time.
- The performance indicators make explicit what learning evidence is essential to collect when assessing student learning, which can support the development of assessment methods while ensuring a congruent approach to assessment.
- The performance levels make explicit what the expected threshold of success is to demonstrate mastery, which can support the implementation of assessment across different methods, faculty, and staff to ensure a congruent approach to assessment.
Click the drop-down tabs below to learn more about the parts of a learning outcome rubric and how to create them. Additionally, you may watch an online training video on developing program learning outcome rubrics that was created by our office which is available on our “online video trainings” page.
Learning Outcome Rubric Information
Parts of a Learning Outcome Rubric
Learning outcome rubrics consist of three key components:
- Performance indicators: Specific areas of knowledge / skill that you expect to observe from students which collectively serve as evidence of learning relative to a learning outcome.
- Performance levels: Different levels that reflect how well students demonstrate learning (e.g., below expectations, meets expectations, exceeds expectations).
- Descriptions for student attainment: Specific, observable, and measurable descriptions of what student performance looks like for each performance indicator at every performance level.
Considerations for Identifying Performance Indicators
Performance indicators provide the critical link between a stated learning outcome and how that learning outcome is understood in order collect observable, measurable evidence of learning. Performance indicators make clear the core content knowledge and skills that are explicit and implicit within a learning outcome, and when relevant, which context(s) learning should be applied.
To help identify performance indicators, consider the following question: When measuring student learning outcomes, what specifically would student mastery and learning progress look like?
- What do the faculty / staff want or need students to know or do as a result of completing the program?
- What do the faculty / staff realistically promote through the design of the program’s curriculum / educational experience?
- What claims do the faculty / staff want to be able to make about their students?
Consider the following example:
Learning outcome: Students will be able to demonstrate knowledge of educational research methods to conduct original research
Based on this learning outcome, there could be 2 primary performance indicators:
- Knowledge of educational research methods
- Application of selected educational research method to original research
The second performance indicator could have multiple sub-indicators that reflect different ways / contexts knowledge of the outcome ought to be applied. These could include applying knowledge of education research methods to:
2a. Research question
2b. Data collection methods
2c. Data analysis
Considerations for Creating Descriptions for Student Attainment
When crafting descriptions for student attainment, consider the following best practices:
- Descriptions should include student behaviors that are observable and measurable.
- Descriptions should be mutually exclusive from one another. To help ensure they are mutually exclusive, they may include text with what student behavior should look like at a given performance level, but may also cite behaviors that should not be present at a given performance level.
- Descriptions may differ at each performance level based on qualitative and / or qualitative factors relative to the performance indicator.
Learning Outcome Rubric Template and Example
When developing a learning outcome rubric, it will generally look like a grid or table with the program learning outcome written at the top
- Performance indicators will be identified on the left-hand side, with each indicator being on its own row.
- Performance levels will be identified on the top row, with each level having its own column.
- Descriptions for student attainment will appear for each performance indicator at each performance level.
You may download a generic learning outcome rubric template here.
An abbreviated example of a learning outcome rubric related to research might look like this (which you can download here):
- At the top, the learning outcome is written: Students will be able to demonstrate knowledge of educational research methods to conduct original research.
- The performance levels are listed at the top of each column, differentiating thresholds for when students exceed expectations, meet expectations, and are below expectations.
- For this abbreviated example, there are only two performance indicators listed on the left side of each row Attainment of the learning outcome requires 1) research method knowledge, and also 2) the ability to apply that knowledge to one’s own original research. The second performance indicator pertaining to application of research knowledge could have many sub-indicators. For the sake of this abbreviated example, only one sub-indicator is shown here, related to a students’ ability to apply research method knowledge to their research question.
- For both performance indicators, a description of what learning looks like at each performance level is written out in a way that they are mutually exclusive.
- For research method knowledge, differentiation between performance levels is based on the number of methods a student demonstrates knowledge about as well as their ability to compare and contrast those methods.
- For application to their research question, differentiation between performance levels is based on students’ ability to adequately explain why the research method selected is congruent with their research question, and in the case of exceeded expectations, is also able to explain why other research methods are less appropriate for the students identified research question.
In the future, you will be able to access examples of learning outcome rubrics here via box (requires a UIC log-in).