How do you assess interdisciplinary skills?
More and more teachers tend to include interdisciplinary skills as learning objectives in their courses. Students, in order to prepare for future working life, need these types of skills to solve problems that cannot be tackled by a single discipline. We have developed a new rubric to help assess these skills.
Assessing interdisciplinary skills can be difficult
Interdisciplinary skills can be practiced by a wide range of learning activities, like writing a paper but also role playing. Assessing the interdisciplinary skills in these various learning activities can be difficult. That is why a rubric has been developed for assessing interdisciplinary skills regardless of the ‘product’ of the learning activity.
Seven categories
The rubric contains seven categories that are considered important for interdisciplinary learning. The first three are typical learning goals in interdisciplinary learning, while the last four are more general academic skills that are very important when working in interdisciplinary settings.
- Disciplinary grounding
- Perspective taking
- Common ground & Integration
- Critical Reflection
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Adaptability and creativity
If you want to create your own rubric for interdisciplinary skills, you can choose the relevant categories depending on the chosen learning activity and determine the weight of the used categories. A rubric constructed in this way, might be shared with students and used for summative and formative assessments.
