The challenges of assessment in project-based design education

Workshop

Chairs: Dr Elies Dekoninck, Dr Erik Bohemia, Dr Francesca Mattioli, Dr Gordon Krauss, Dr Hilary Grierson, Dr Ross Brisco, Dr Yakhoub Ndiaye

Organised by: Design Education SIG

Within Design Education, there are a wide range of common practices of assessment on open-ended projects. When considering capstone or industrial collaboration projects between students and an industry partner, there is a wide variance on what is being assessed. In some cases, we cannot see past the final outcome of the students’ projects to be able to assess the success of the design process nor the extent to which the students have met the learning outcomes of the design course. In other cases, the marking schema and rubrics may be so detailed and constraining that markers compensate and deviate to capture student achievement. Furthermore, having a company stakeholder can further complicate assessment, as we consider how much of an influence they should play on the awarded grade.

Even though project-based learning is comprehensively adopted across Design Education, key challenges in assessment still need to be resolved and best-practice still needs sharing more widely. Whilst we don’t expect to come to a perfect solution for all, challenges can be collected and clustered. Existing solutions and best practices can then be mapped to those challenges, to start to create a library of solutions and identify gaps in the knowledge.

This workshop will first present the state-of-the-art literature on the challenges and solutions for Assessment in Project-based Design Education. Then the workshop will capture first hand experiences from the workshop participants of both the challenges and the solutions. From this, we will gain rich first-hand insights from all participants ranging from experts to new design educators. A group activity will then map solutions and best practice to the main challenges identified. This will provide the basis for a discussion of the gaps in the knowledge and an articulation of the initial ideas for further collaborative research.

The outcomes of this workshop will be conducted to map the challenges and solutions of the complexity across the spectrum of design education and analysis, using real-world experience from design educators, and will lead to a better understanding of assessment in Project-based Design Education.

Learn more at: https://www.designconference.org/workshops#workshops