A Cross‐Disciplinary Approach to Evaluating the Senior Thesis

C apstone theses—the culminating project in certain curricula—are an important place to perform summative assessment, as these artifacts should provide evidence of the highest skill level that students achieve. The goal of this project is to develop a rubric that might be used to evaluate advanced student work across all analytical, research-based, disciplines. Our aim in developing such an approach is to address a certain type of student work, rather than a single skill or discipline. Senior theses in the analytic mode typically comprise writing, research, and critical thinking components. Because these are common features of capstone work, we argue, it should be possible to develop a cross-disciplinary rubric by which to evaluate them. We began developing the rubric (see Table 1, page 14) in spring 2006. The first version consisted of eleven components: rationale; dealing with complexity in framing the topic; approach; scholarly context; position; argument; use of data/evidence; insight—seeing patterns and connections; usage, grammar, and spelling; organization; and clarity, style, and readability. Eleven faculty members representing four institutions and eight disciplines used the draft rubric to evaluate eighty-one theses. Initially, all readers evaluated a single thesis and each independently assigned rubric scores. As a norming exercise, the group then discussed the scores they had assigned for each component, which eventually led to their agreeing on how to describe the quality of that particular thesis. Over the next two days, evaluators scored the remaining theses and discussed how to improve the rubric. Creating a rubric that was both interdisciplinary and discriminated adequately between varying levels of quality entailed (1) providing sufficient detail in the text of each cell to assist readers in placing marginal works at appropriate levels; (2) finding evaluative language that seemed appropriate to the widest variety of disciplines (such as referring to “evidence” as well as “data”); and (3) raising the standard of Level 2 so that a wider range of weak student work would fit Level 1, and that Level 3 would represent quite high-quality work, reserving Level 4 for truly exceptional work that A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Evaluating the Senior Thesis