Work in progress — Refining a technical communication rubric for first-year engineering instructors

At Michigan Technological University, we offer approximately 23 sections of first-year engineering courses (ENG1001, ENG1101, and ENG1102) every fall semester. For course assessment and accreditation reporting, it is important to have a reliable metric of student performance. Perhaps even more important is for this metric to produce comparable results when used by different instructors. The authors began by reviewing the reliability of a rubric developed by Washington State University. For our courses, this rubric was not applicable for all assignments and not reliable between instructors teaching different sections of the same course. Therefore, the rubric was modified to reduce inconsistencies in grading between different instructors and standardize it so that the same rubric could be used for first-year engineering technical communication assignments. This paper focuses on the process of adapting and evaluating a technical communication rubric for use with multiple instructors and assignments. Our process for developing, refining and using a common rubric will be discussed as well as the challenges encountered and the modifications required making it an effective tool for course assessment.

Introduction

Annually at Michigan Tech (MTU), approximately 900 students go through the first-year engineering program. Each fall, 23 sections of our first-year engineering courses: ENG1001(Engineering Problem Solving), ENG1101 (Engineering Problem Solving and Analysis), and ENG1102 (Engineering Modeling and Design) are taught. Since each instructor teaches at most 3 sections, there is a challenge in assessing student performance with respect to course outcomes. The use of rubrics when scoring student work provides the program with valuable information about how students are progressing and specific areas where students need to improve [1]. In the fall of 2010, two instructors worked on adapting a technical communication rubric to the technical communication assignments in ENG1001.