Best practices for associating Outcomes in Rubrics with detailed level descriptions

[RobLucas]

Outcomes include levels of performance (meets expectations, exceeds, etc.) but there's not a field to include detailed descriptions of what constitutes performance at each level. So, when I import outcomes into a rubric as criteria, there's no detail about why an individual student submission should be rated at a given level. There's also no way to create separate criteria and then associate them with an outcome. (For example, you can't create a rule that if a student scores X on one or more criteria, then they are considered Y on a given outcome, as established here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/How-Do-I-Make-Criteria-Roll-Up-To-Outcomes-...)

So, how do people actually use outcomes in rubrics, in practice? How do you know (and specify publicly) how to assign levels on an outcome? Are there best practices?

-Rob

[ProfessorBeyrer · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the community, @RobLucas! Your post and the one you linked both get to a tension between the feedback we provide students on their assignment submissions and the process we use to document the achievement of outcomes. I understand the need to document outcome achievement but already work hard to design rubrics that help me to give students meaningful feedback on their assignment submissions. Frankly it feels like doing the same job twice.

I have a workaround that I use now. I don't know that it's a best practice, but it helps me document outcome achievement with a bit of automation.

• The short description of my process: I associate no more than one outcome to each assignment, divide my assignments into groups by outcome, and use an ungraded assignment to record whether each student has achieved each outcome. A key detail is I do not use the outcomes as rubric criteria except for that single ungraded assignment. 
• The long video showing what I do and how our college researcher collects the data: Canvas - Easy Documentation of Outcomes Achievement

But this does not help instructors who want to use the outcomes as part of their grading rubrics. To help with that, I proposed an idea to improve the Outcome and Rubric tools in Canvas. Please take a look and give it 5 stars if you think it will help you:

Make meaningful the point value of Outcomes used as Rubric criteria

I hope our colleagues in the Instructure Community also share how they handle this.