Scaffolding rubrics to improve student writing

In the era of accreditation academic accountability and transparency within curriculum is becoming a desired standard within and across disciplines. Through the use of course learning outcomes program outcomes can be... [ view full abstract ]

In the era of accreditation academic accountability and transparency within curriculum is becoming a desired standard within and across disciplines. Through the use of course learning outcomes program outcomes can be strengthened. Scaffolding within curriculums can benefit both accountability and assessment goals. Through the use of Bloom’s taxonomy, scaffolding within the course can be used to aide in the accomplishment of the course learning outcomes. Scaffolding within the course curriculum can move students through Bloom’s taxonomy levels toward mastery of specific skills. Writing is a major area of assessment as an indication of learning across disciplines. However, students present numerous deficits in their writing skills producing frustration for faculty in both reading the submitted material and achievement of required skills for outcome measures. To address these issues, scaffolding rubrics were used within sociology courses to specifically address both student learning and mechanical writing skills. Preliminary results of using rubrics to enhance student learning and scaffolding in eight courses one 100-level, one 200-level, two 300-level and four 400-level sociology courses will be presented.