Targeted Assessment Rubric: An Empirically Grounded Rubric for Interdisciplinary Writing

In this paper, the authors introduce the "Targeted Assessment Rubric for Interdisciplinary Writing," an empirically-tested instrument designed to assess interdisciplinary writing at the collegiate level. Interdisciplinary writing presents unique challenges to students, calling upon them to mediate the rhetorical, theoretical, and methodological differences inherent in multiple disciplinary discourses. The rubric proposes four distinct dimensions to be examined: a paper's "purposefulness," "disciplinary grounding," "integration," and "critical awareness." For each criterion, four qualitatively distinct levels of student achievement are described: "naive," "novice," "apprentice," and "master." The rubric builds on a clear definition of interdisciplinary work, a related assessment framework, and recent scholarship on interdisciplinary writing. Here, the authors review the assessment literature and the rubric's conceptual foundations. They introduce the rubric through an example of student work and describe the methods by which they developed and tested it. They conclude with concrete recommendations for practice. (Contains 1 table.)