The first Mastery Rubric was developed 2005-2010 and eight additional MRs have been published since then. This first MR has been completely revised – and renamed – the Mastery Rubric for Scientific Thinking, leveraging everything I have learned about the realities of curriculum development and course evaluation and revision in the past 21 years. Most recently (2023-2025) I have worked on a hands-on workshop for higher education instructors to utilize their own syllabus and identify the best places and ways to integrate (not concatenate) new material, activities, or ideas into the existing course. The paradigm is called -not surprisingly- “Integration, not Concatenation” (InC). Its objectives are to enable instructors to expand a course in an evidence-based way -i.e., integration – without making the new material feel inauthentically bolted on/slotted in -i.e., concatenation. The workshop was piloted over 8 hours within one department that teaches a minimum of three courses to all undergraduate students at the entire institution and also homes the curricula for three Bachelor’s degree programs.
In the pilot project, program and course directors were able to integrate activities and content relating to ethical practice in mathematics, statistics, and data science into their courses, curricula, and the department’s contributions to the institution’s overall objectives. The key attributes of the InC paradigm are: a) orientation for instructors to the ways in which their existing learning objectives can be augmented or revised slightly (or added to) so that new material or ideas can be integrated organically into an existing course; b) introduction to the most salient aspects of cognitive and educational sciences that can facilitate the integration of new material or activities in the future; and c) a common vocabulary and developmental trajectory they can use to communicate to their students, other instructors, the department, and others via their CV/teaching portfolio, about their intent to integrate new ideas or materials without losing or concertina-ing content that is already in the course.
The pilot project was successful in that the target new material, ethical reasoning content and activities, were integrated across all of the courses whose course directors were in attendance. Lessons learned are summarized in a follow up white paper. I am currently working on a workshop series to support the integration of ethical and effective AI tool use to promote these and the development of metacognition in higher education courses. I will post results when available!