Background
It is increasingly important for educators to design a learning environment that engages students and fosters creativity. Integrating arts and design in educational practice is a widely used pedagogy to foster a deeper conceptual understanding of domain content areas and enhance students’ cognitive skills that transfer to another domain. Grading is an important teaching strategy to motivate student learning. However, student creativity might be purged by a fear of being judged by educators through grading. Little is known about how to design a rubric to grade student creativity while at the same time fostering student creativity, enhancing domain specific learning, and increasing engagement with the course when students are learning nursing domain content using the arts.
Purpose
The article describes how we developed a rubric to help create a learning environment to foster student creativity, enhance domain-specific learning, and increase engagement with the course.
Design/Method
We conducted a critical case study of nursing pedagogy over multiple semesters in an online nursing education course offered by a college of nursing. In an assignment that required students to use art and design skills to reflect on what they had learned, we created a rubric that described the criteria for content and grammar in novice, competent, and proficient levels. We left the third item and its criteria at the three levels blank. We asked the students to supply this information. We then synthesized all the student results and posted them as the third item of the rubric used to grade student assignments. The evaluation data included course materials, students’ online learning activities, the instructors’ opinions, students’ grades, and students’ self-reflection journals. We analyzed the data qualitatively.
Results
In the nursing assignment in our case study, the domain knowledge learning outcome was well represented by knowledge transfer using the arts. Most students were positively engaged in the learning process. However, most students chose to use an available artwork instead of creating something new.
Conclusions
An analysis of pedagogy focused on self-designed assessment tools in the nursing curriculum revealed opportunities for growth in student engagement and creative skill development. Motivating students to design their own assessment process is a key need in nursing pedagogy to engage students, improve their creative skills, and enhance their learning of domain knowledge.