Setting Expectations: Rubrics as a Formative Tool for Communicating in the Social Sciences

Discipline-specific writing styles, standards, and expectations are often left implicit or untaught. A ‘Writing in the Disciplines’ approach can therefore improve and broaden access to disciplinary conversations and forms of knowledge. Rubrics, by making expectations explicit, are well-suited for introducing and practicing a wide range of specific writing skills. This cluster-randomized control trial tests the effectiveness of rubrics for improving social science writing in a large, introductory lecture-style political science course. We find that an iterated intervention using a rubric has the potential to improve student performance on essay structure, especially for students that had not yet completed a generalized college-level writing course.