The Design of a Rubric for Defining and Assessing Digital Education Skills of Higher Education Students

Abstract

The usage of rubrics is nowadays a developing trend in the world of Higher Education. One can think about two main reasons for this. First, even if there is no definitive proof, rubrics seem to be adequate for supporting the learning of complex skills, in particular for formative assessment. Rubrics are then finding a natural place in HE institutions in the context of the 21st Century where digital education skills become more and more important and need to be well defined and assessed. Secondly, rubrics are based on very easy principles and this simplicity may contribute to the trend noted.However, our experience of doing rubrics for defining and assessing the students’ digital education skills revealed us that the design of rubrics needs its basic principles but also additional rules in order to make a rubric that can be used as an efficient assessment tool. In this perspective, we decided to compile and explain in this article the rules that we have applied during our rubric design work. Some rules were found in the literature; other ones were elaborated during our work progression. With this compilation, we want to bring the reader concrete guiding elements and steps for the design of rubrics. A general rule seems to emerge from our work: a rubric maker should always try to distinguish between all the aspects of the competences needed to perform a task and all the aspects of all the different levels that can be seen in the competences of a person who is performing the task.