Background

This rubric was developed to enhance the effectiveness of educational practices utilizing "Intercultural Collaborative Learning, (ICL)" in which international students and domestic students learn from each other through meaningful interactions. ICL is expected to yield learning outcomes where learners deepen their understanding of different cultures and their own culture through mutual learning and collaboration, leading to the development of new perspectives (Suematsu, 2017). While ICL is recognized as an effective method for enhancing intercultural understanding, challenges have arisen in recent years regarding how to measure students’ learning outcomes and visualize their learning process.

To address these challenges, researchers and practitioners of ICL from various universities with different characteristics such as university type, size, location, educational philosophy, and characteristics, launched a research project and developed this rubric over a period of two years. Through this process, extensive literature reviews, case studies both domestically and internationally, and repeated surveys and verifications to enhance the accuracy of the rubric were conducted, aiming to create a highly versatile indicator that considers as many learners and diverse learning formats as possible.

Structure of rubric

This ICL rubric consists of four major categories and twenty subcategories, with each competency subcategory set according to four developmental stages. In contrast to AAC&U's deliberate simplification of competency items, this rubric prioritized the enrichment of competency items that grow through ICL. Therefore, there are similar items or items that appear to overlap at first glance. The intention is to encourage users to select competency items according to their educational objectives and assemble rubrics specialized for educational practices, rather than categorizing individual subcategories into general intercultural competence categories.