Writing and Critical Thinking Rubrics

The writing and critical thinking rubrics were developed on our campus more than a decade ago, which has made this project one of the most useful since faculty members feel a strong sense of ownership in the project. The rubrics have evolved over the years and they have produced a wealth of very useful data. We have collected persuasive research papers from English Composition in the freshman year and Senior Seminar in the senior year in order to compare students' improvements in writing and critical thinking. A few years ago, we increased the amount of writing in the program (with particular emphasis on the use of standard English) as a result of data from this project. The writing and critical thinking rubrics are used to evaluate papers nominated for the Senior Seminar Paper Award. The data from evaluating these top papers have been informative in that the sample clearly is not random but rather represents the very best papers written by seniors at Shawnee.