Rubrics & Resources

Resources from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)

Since 1915, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has been a leading national organization promoting the value of undergraduate liberal arts education. Its members share a commitment to providing high-quality liberal arts education to all students, regardless of socio-economic background, academic specialization, or intended career. For information about AAC&U, click here.

AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise Initiative (LEAP)

LEAP aligns essential learning outcomes to the values associated with a liberal arts education. For information about LEAP and the LEAP essential learning outcomes, click here

AAC&U’s Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE)

The VALUE rubrics are a part of AAC&U’s LEAP Initiative. AAC&U encourages faculty members at institutions of higher education to fully adapt and use the VALUE rubrics, to modify the rubrics, or to combine rubric items to suit the content and assessment goals for individual courses. For information about the VALUE rubrics project, click here

Click each learning outcome below to access the corresponding VALUE rubric. To view all of the rubrics in one PDF document, click here.

*AAC&U hosted a pre-conference workshop in October of 2013 that focused on the Global Learning rubric. Please click here for workshop presentation.

AAC&U’s Multistate Collaborative to Advance Learning Outcomes Assessment (MSC)

Supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, AAC&U has recently begun a nation-wide project to benchmark the VALUE rubrics. This project involves 69 two and four-year public institutions in nine state higher education systems. For information about AAC&U’s Multistate Collaborative to Advance Learning Outcomes Assessment (MSC) and AAC&U’s partnership with the State Higher Education Executive Officers' association (SHEEO), click here

Institutions participating in AAC&U’s MSC project have created a repository containing resources such as presentations, webinars, classroom handouts, and assignments for those who use AAC&U’s VALUE rubrics. To access MSC faculty resources, click here

For those faculty using Blackboard, the AAC&U rubrics are also available in Blackboard rubric format. Please visit the Office of E-Learning VALUE Rubrics page to download.


Stockton’s ELO Learning Maps

The Learning Maps for Stockton’s ten Essential Learning Outcomes grew out of campus-wide efforts in 2010 and 2011 to identify and to provide examples and definitions for each of the outcomes. The Maps offer guidance for ways in which faculty members and professional staff who create learning opportunities for Stockton students might consider incorporating ELOs into assignments, exercises, and courses.

The Learning Maps are not rubrics; however, some faculty members have adapted one or more of the Learning Maps into formative assessment or grading tools for the purposes of measuring students’ learning in their courses.

To access Stockton’s ten ELO Learning Maps, click here.


Rubrics Developed at Stockton

Adapting to Change Rubric

There are various types of changes that students might find themselves adapting to during college: changes in personal identity; intellectual or spiritual changes; changes in social lives and family or community socio-economic circumstances; changes in the world around them; and changes that need to occur and that the student/group of students can work to effect. For a rubric that can be used to assess class projects that ask students to identify a needed social change or to map out an advocacy strategy, click here.

Information Literacy Rubric

For the rubric used during Stockton’s 2014 ELO pilot to assess information literacy and research skills, click here.

This rubric is adapted by Sonia Gonsalves and Mary Ann Trail from the ELO Learning Map for Information Literacy and Research Skills and from the American Library Association (ALA) Information Literacy Competency Standards. For more information about the ALA and the ALA competency standards, click here.


Resources Developed at Other Institutions

Faculty at other institutions have created valuable resources for integrating essential learning outcomes into programs and courses or for assessing them. A few useful resources are listed below. Click the name of each resource to access the corresponding guide or rubric.