Education Commons^™

Rubrics As A Tool For Reaching Explicitly Evaluative Conclusions: Implications For Evaluation Theory, Training, And Practice, Krystin S. R. Martens

Dissertations

Evaluation is the systematic determination of merit, worth, or significance. A core professional evaluator competency is to provide transparent and explicit evaluative conclusions. Yet, “understanding the reasoning process to establish evaluative conclusions drawn in practice has to be the field’s greatest unmet challenge” (Fournier, 1995, p. 1). This three-article dissertation studies rubrics as a tool that can assist in meeting the stated challenge when used by program evaluators to reach explicitly evaluative conclusions.

Study 1 provides an account of the history and etymology of the term rubric and provides an analysis of peer-reviewed program evaluation literature, specific to the extent …