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.