In this project, advisers of bachelor’s research projects in the Teaching Institute Earth Sciences, examiners of bachelor’s dissertations, and experts on education and assessment  will collaborate to develop a shared vision on the quality of bachelor’s dissertations that can be translated into a rubric that can then be used by advisers, examiners, and students. We will explore a single-point rubric in which we describe the assessment criteria of work up to an excellent standard. Additionally, we will explore a two-point rubric in which we also describe the assessment criteria of work up to sufficient standard.

Background

When deployed appropriately, rubrics may contribute to helping students understand what is expected of them as well as to developing an understanding, shared among advisers, examiners, and students, of what high quality work looks like. Rubrics generally come in two flavors, analytical and single point rubrics. Analytical rubrics consist of a matrix with assessment criteria listed in the leftmost column and standards (i.e., levels of performance) listed across the top row. When the work is graded (semi)quantitatively, the standards are mapped onto grades. Single-point rubrics describe a single standard—usually excellence—which is mapped onto one point on the grading scale, hence the name single-point rubric. These two flavors of rubric in part reflect two approaches to grading of student work, analytical and holistic grading. In analytical grading, an examiner is expected to make separate qualitative judgements on each of several elements of assessment criteria (Sadler 2009). This contrasts with holistic grading, whereby an examiner makes a single qualitative judgement of the work as a whole and maps that judgement onto the appropriate point on a grading scale (Sadler 2009).

Aim

The aim of this project is to develop a shared vision on the quality of bachelor’s dissertations and translate it into a rubric, exploring both single-point and two-point rubric formats for assessment criteria up to excellent and sufficient standards, respectively. The goal is to facilitate conversations on high-quality academic work among advisers, examiners, and students, enabling consistent assessment and grading practices.

Project description

We will adopt an approach similar to that described in Prins et al. (2017).

• Phase 1: June 2024 to December 2024
  In this phase, we design the document of the rubric as well as an informative “user manual.”
  Collaboratively, with a group of advisers and examiners of the Teaching Institute Earth Sciences, we will develop criteria for assessment of a bachelor’s dissertation (and research project) in Earth Sciences and decide on the relative weight of the criteria. Once we decide on the criteria, we will describe standards of student learning and written work and developing a shared understanding of high-quality work. The outcome of this phase will be a single- or two-point rubric.
• Phase 2: January 2025 to June 2025
  In this phase, we will apply and test the rubric. We will ask a test group of advisers and students to use the rubric before and during We will ask a test group of examiners to assess a bachelor’s dissertation using both the old

Results

We will design a rubric to be used by advisers and students before and during a research project to facilitate conversations surrounding high quality academic work and how to achieve it. The same rubric can be used by examiners to assess and grade (holistically) bachelor’s dissertations as well as provide argumentation for their judgment of quality. In addition to the rubric another deliverable of this project is an informative document on how to deploy a rubric following best practices.