Dear Teena,
Thanks for your message I agree with you there are underlying problems with
assessment in design education in the areas you point to. Similar problems
have been found in many other practice-based or professional fields. Many of
these fields also have creative thinking as a central feature of
professional skills. In these other fields, the problems of assessment seem
similar to those of design.
The main assessment problem areas appear to be in relation to formative
assessment, negotiated learning, and assessment of higher professional
skills.
I feel the approaches to portfolios developed in these other fields are
useful for assessment in design education because they combine two roles: a
'container' of evidence and meta-information about the relationships between
a student's evidence of learning and their intended learning. This enables
portfolios of this sort to address most problems of assessment because of
the flexibility in who decides learning areas and outcomes, who decides what
evidence that can be provided, the choice of relationships between evidence
and intended learning, and the possibility of transitional assessment during
learning that enables formative assessment.
The additional element of this sort of portfolio is the meta-information
that describes the relationship between a student's evidence and their
intended learning. This differentiates this form of portfolio from
conventional art, design and architecture portfolios.
You point to the need for 'assessment becoming internalised by students to
foster their learning in life beyond the requirements of the institution'.
I feel there are many dimensions on this. At one end are the problems of
students having 'self delusion, overconfidence, and faulty self awareness'
and at the other are situated the best of self-critical professional
reflective practices. In this, what to assess and how depends on the
purposes of the education and assessment processes. To derive successful
assessment depends on these purposes being explicit in the curriculum
design.
Some of this material was presented at the Research in Design Education
Conference in 2000. A preprint is at
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2000/2000%20RIDE%20Porfolios%2
0in%20Des%20Ed_TC&TL.htm
Some other pre-prints on portfolio-based assessment that might be of
interest are:
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2004/Online%20portfolios_TL&TC
_IS2003.doc
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2002/2002%20Aare%20%20Online_p
ortfolios_TC&TL.htm
http://www.love.com.au/PublicationsTLminisite/2001/2001%20WeB01%20OnlinePort
folios&IS_TC&TL.htm
I welcome your comments
Terry
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