Faculty Development

This semester I’m attending a series of Faculty Development Workshops at NJIT designed to assist new faculty with such essentials as teaching, grant writing, publishing, and tenure & promotion.

I’m posting here now in hopes of getting some feedback on a couple of rubrics I developed after attending the second such workshop.

I’m having students give group presentations in my course on Sports, Technology, and Society, and I was searching for ways to help ensure that all members contributed to the group presentation, as well as to differentiate among varying degrees of contribution. Last Tuesday’s workshop focused on assessment, with some treatment of the use of rubrics for both formative and summative assessment. I did a bit more research on my own, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

First, I developed a two-pronged approach. I want to be able to grade the presentation as a whole, as well as each individual’s contribution to that presentation. I decided to make the group presentation grade worth 60% and the individual contribution grade worth 40% of the overall presentation grade.

Second, I developed the group presentation rubric. For this, I owe a debt to several of the rubrics posted by the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University. I found the rubrics for the philosophy paper and the oral presentation particularly helpful. I am thinking about using this rubric both for formative evaluation (to show the students what I expect), as well as for summative evaluation (actually grading the presentations).

Third, I developed the individual peer assessment rubric. I would actually have the students anonymously fill out one of these for each of their fellow group members. For this rubric, I found a publication from the University of New South Wales to be quite helpful (especially Table 2).

I’d be quite interested in constructive feedback on this approach.