Innovation in Language Learning

Intercultural competence is one of the keystones within most international higher education curricula design due to a variety of reasons, among which internationalization of tertiary education is one of the most outstanding ones. The assessment of such competence by university teachers is not an easy task. The main goal of this paper is to describe the design of a rubric that could be applied by an array of content higher education teachers who would be interested in assessing their students’ intercultural development. The validity of the content of this rubric has followed the Delphi method, according to which the researchers’ team set a series of questions that took into account the consensus of experts on intercultural education. Then, comprehension was validated by testing a sample of the instrument on a Spanish cohort of Primary Education students (4^th year of Primary Education Teacher Training – Speciality on English). The rubric was refined until it exhibited appropriate adjustments with regard to both content and comprehension validity through Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for internal consistency settings. The confirmatory factor analysis accomplished confirmed also the dimensions upon which the rubric was finally built.

Keywords: assessment, intercultural competence, instrument, rubric design.