Assessment of Students' Argumentative Writing: A Rubric Development

In: Journal of ethnic and cultural studies: JECS, Band 9, Heft 2, S. 121-133

Abstract

A rubric is used for assessing student work and performance. It is a tool that works in various ways to develop student learning and has great possibilities. The study presented aims to investigate the rubric development of second language learners' argumentative writing. The study's significance is to explore how well the rubric assesses students' achievement of the skills needed to develop argumentative essays. This study will add to the literature more data regarding rubrics' effectiveness in providing constructive feedback to students. This research describes the results of the current study in relation to rubric feedback from undergraduate students and the faculty who teach them from a private university in Saudi Arabia. The use of the rubric would be to support instruction and student performance. The researchers have proposed a methodology to design, develop, and implement a rubric as a scoring guide for argumentative essays based upon the achievement of learning outcomes for this genre. The rubric was developed to evaluate the following criterion: organization, integrating academic sources, thesis statement, finding evidence/lack of evidence, writing refutation paragraph, writing counterclaims, content, academic tone, mechanic, and vocabulary. The researchers statistically found significant interrater reliability and convergent validity coefficients. The results are considered to encourage the evaluation and development of such rubrics to be used across universities and colleges.