Refining a rubric for evaluating lifelong learning and career awareness in a first-year learning community

A four-level rubric based on Bloom's learning taxonomy was created in 2005 to evaluate student responses to co-curricular activities and determine if the activities' career awareness and lifelong learning objectives were achieved. Students were not provided with specific guidelines for the written summaries. Holistic evaluation of summaries by three independent researchers showed that co-curricular activities can be effective in enhancing a first-year student's appreciation for lifelong learning as a key part of a professional engineer's career. Also in 2005, the three researchers identified key words/phrases associated with each of the four levels of the rubric, and there was generally strong agreement among the researchers in using the rubric in scoring the written summaries. This paper reports quantitative and qualitative results of further investigation on the inter- rater reliability of the evaluation rubric, and whether providing students with a guideline for the written summaries influences their performance. For this expanded research, a total of six evaluators and two groups of 32 students were involved. Results of chi-square tests for the differences between the two groups of evaluators and the two groups of student summaries are presented. This research will expand perception of how Bloom's learning taxonomy could be used in lifelong learning assessment, and should be of value to anyone interested in assessing lifelong learning.