Help me understand the differences among criteria, outcomes, and rubrics

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espertus
Community Explorer

My background is in engineering, not education, and I am having trouble figuring out the differences among criteria, outcomes, and rubrics. I've searched the documentation, but everything I've found either describes the mechanics of setting them up or uses too vague of terms for me to understand.

Here's my situation: I want to use mastery learning and have created 6 rubrics for my computer architecture course. Each consists of multiple criteria. For example, the criteria for the Digital Logic rubric are:

  1. Converting a problem description into a truth table
  2. Finding the minimal sum-of-products formula with a Karnaugh map
  3. Converting a formula to a logic diagram
  4. Creating a wiring diagram
  5. Building and testing a full-adder in hardware

Should each of these criteria be a learning outcome? If so, there would be about 30 for the course, which seems high. What's the difference between a group of outcomes and a rubric?

Since few, if any, assignments test all of the criteria on a rubric, it generally doesn't make sense to attach one to an assignment. Instead, I would like to attach specific criteria (learning outcomes?) to assignments, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

In case my criteria and rubrics are too esoteric, here is an analogous list of criteria for a rubric on building a brick wall in a hypothetical course on building porcine houses:

  1. Finding materials suitable for making bricks.
  2. Forming bricks.
  3. Baking bricks.
  4. Making mortar.
  5. Laying bricks and mortar.

Since no single assignment tests all of these criteria, should they be groups of learning outcomes instead? Would rubrics be overlapping subsets of learning outcomes (generally within the same group) unique to a specific assignment?

Thank you.

Ellen

 

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espertus
Community Explorer

I think I've figured it out, at least relative to Canvas, not necessarily matching the external definitions of terms.

Instead of creating rubrics with criteria directly, I am creating learning outcomes for everything I want to test. To continue the example from my original post, I would create these outcomes:

  1. Finding materials suitable for making bricks.
  2. Forming bricks.
  3. Baking bricks.
  4. Making mortar.
  5. Laying bricks and mortar.

I would put them into an outcome group Building Brick Houses.

For the brick-making assignment, I create a rubric Making Bricks that contains the first 3 outcomes. I have a mortar-making assignment that contains the fourth outcome and a brick-laying assignment that contains the last outcome.

When students go to the Learning Mastery tab in their gradebook, they can see their progress to each of the outcomes.

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