The Design, Use and Revision of Scoring Rubrics to Enhance Student Performance in a Multidisciplinary, Student-Directed Course on Global Climate Change

Efforts to promote increasingly student-centered learning environments in the geosciences have resulted in a need for new tools for enhancing and assessing levels of student performance. Over the past several decades, educators of many disciplines have been researching and promoting the use of scoring rubrics for both evaluating student work and providing feedback based on that work. As part of a research project on assessment, scoring rubrics were used in an upper-division undergraduate geography course entitled "Mock Environmental Summit." In this course, students act as representatives of groups of countries or non-governmental organizations and research topics related to the causes and consequences of global climate change. Based on this research, the students select topics that they believe to be of key importance and present oral and written summaries of the information they have gathered on those topics. The course culminates with a "summit" and drafting of an international agreement modeled on the Kyoto Protocol. Due to the emphasis on writing and presentations during the class, scoring rubrics were designed to provide guidelines that students could use for self-assessment when preparing oral and written reports, to facilitate detailed feedback from instructors to students, and to serve as a standard upon which course grades would be based. In this paper, we present an overview of scoring rubric design, the way in which our rubrics were presented to and utilized with students, and the impacts of their use on student performance. We will also comment on the revisions that we made to our rubrics based on student outcomes, and our ideas about other areas of student performance to which they could be applied.