Developing a Generic Rubric for Evaluating Students' Work in STEM Education

Harnessing rubrics in educational assessment is regarded as a promising approach to improving learning and enhancing instructional impact. A well-designed rubric can effectively help communicate expectations of performance to students and provide them with feedback. This study seeks to find an appropriate way to develop a generic rubric that can be adopted by practitioners and researchers to evaluate STEM inventions. In order to secure the validity of the rubric content, we reviewed the literature of (i) rubric design principles, (ii) rubrics in STEM studies, and (iii) rubrics applied in STEM competitions. Based on the review, we proposed that STEM work can be evaluated from six dimensions: (i) problem definition, (ii) feasibility, (iii) usability, (iv) teamwork, (v) entrepreneurship, and (vi) overall presentation and justifications. The present work sheds light on the development of a compatible evaluation tool for STEM learning.