Using Standards Rubrics to Assure Graduate Capabilities within the Context of Undergraduate Liberal Arts Programmes: Curriculum Design and Assessment

In 2011 members of the School of Philosophy and Theology at The University of Notre Dame Australia (UNDA) Sydney campus, designed two standards rubrics as part of a project aimed at undertaking research within the area of assuring graduate attributes and capabilities in Australian universities. The standards rubrics designed were oriented towards developing particular graduate attributes intrinsic to the Core Curriculum programme in philosophy, ethics, and theology; all students at UNDA are required to undertake this programme, which reflects a 'liberal arts' or 'liberal education' approach to university education. In this paper, we engage in an institutional case study of this project, discussing the advantages and challenges of developing and using these standards rubrics with a specific focus on: how they have already been used, how we plan to use them in the continuing development of our Core Curriculum programme, and the particular challenges we face in developing standards rubrics within a 'liberal arts' or 'liberal education' environment. In doing so, we will attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of developing standards rubrics as a basis for careful and systematic review of our pedagogical approach, and curriculum and assessment design so as to assure the achievement of graduate attributes and capabilities. Given our focus on developing these standards rubrics within a Catholic liberal education environment, the paper will begin with a discussion of the tradition of liberal education. This tradition provides the immediate context for the graduate attributes and capabilities toward which our rubrics are oriented and helps explain the specific nature of the Core Curriculum programme. The article will then consider key theoretical problems that arise in attempting to assure graduate attributes and capabilities within a liberal education environment, including problems related to educating towards objectives or attributes that are difficult to assess or measure due to their generality. In the final part of the paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of developing standards rubrics as a means of reviewing our pedagogical approach and curriculum design for the purposes of fostering graduate attributes and designing assessments that enable students to demonstrate the degree to which they have attained graduate attributes.