ACPA and NASPA are inviting feedback on the ACPA/NASPA Professional Competency Rubrics, which will release in final form this fall. Please share your feedback via this form by Friday, August 19.
What are Competency Rubrics?
This document adapts the Professional Competency Areas for Student Affairs Educators (ACPA & NASPA, 2015) into rubrics. A rubric is a tool that professionals can use to assess their knowledge, skills, and dispositions across foundational, intermediate, and advanced levels of experience. Each rubric presents the definition of a single competency and distributes its outcomes in a table that lists multiple dimensions of the competency along a developmental scale.
Dimensions. The dimensions of each rubric are derived from the description of the competency. They are listed in the left column. They are aspirational and strengths-based, encouraging developmental progression in the domains of knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
• Knowledge includes the evolving body of student development and learning theories, relevant laws, policies and ethical ideals, as well as management and leadership concepts that guide student affairs practice.
• Skills are actions, best practices, and knowledge-based expertise, such as goal setting, interpersonal communication, use of technology, and assessment.
• Dispositions are relatively stable patterns of behavior that are grounded in an educator’s values and motives, such as collaboration, critical thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, flexibility, openness to constructive feedback.
Scale. The scale has three levels: (1) Foundational; (2) Intermediate; and (3) Advanced. Each level is a column, beginning to the right of the Dimension column. The outcomes within each column describe increasingly complex levels of knowledge, skills, and dispositions in each dimension.
The dimensions and their associated outcomes are benchmarks reflecting knowledge, skills, and dispositions for effective practice, as determined by the literature and expert practitioners. While the rubrics can be used to assess the professional competency of individuals, they are not valid instruments for measuring growth or comparing the performance of others. Users must adapt the rubrics for their own goals and the context of their institution and job function.