HMW assess student work in a meaningful way?
In a previous post, we spoke about hitting the speed bump in the form of a simple question from one of our student-designers:
"Wait...what is innovation?"
From that point, we shifted focus a bit from jumping right into the first design challenge into looking at some design thinking jargon that we ideated should be highest frequency.
A question lingered:
How might we assess in a meaningful and real-world way?
Our Arts & Design Focal Points and Power Standards were our starting point, and we began by imagining not only how to best assess, meaning, which Focal Point and Power Standard this assessment "lived" in, but also we asked ourselves what form would this assessment take that would resemble a real-world situation.
"Understand the designed world by researching existing works with intent to copy, combine, or transform ideas."
As a brief aside, a team at our school developed the Focal Points and Power Standards for our Arts & Design Courses. When we were ideating in the spring about what this course could look like, we agreed that we should not reinvent the wheel by writing a whole new set of assessment Focal Points and Power Standards specific to the iDL course, opting instead to operate within what has already been created and is already in use to assess student work at our school. At this point, we are taking the verbs from Innovator's DNA and composing a prototype of Learning Outcomes - I CAN statements - specific to the iDL course. Look for a future blog post with an update on that process.
NOW...what will this assessment look like? First, we engaged in a sense-making inquiry-based method of defining the terms. Dr. Wass created a task in which the definition of the fifteen terms could be found by examining real-world source material readily available on the internet. With the definitions in hand, we gave the student-designers a case study from a real-world source to see if they could identify instances of prototyping, iterating, empathy, etc. If they found the terms alive and breathing in the case study, they annotated the document to make their thinking visible, and we discussed what each group found. This was our formative phase of assessment.
For the summative phase, we wrote our own case study using characters the student-designers all knew and loved: their iDL instructors!
We use what is referred to as a "NEPAd" scale, which is a rubric ranging from Novice, then to Emerging, Proficient, and then finally Advanced. See the image above to see how we saw each competency level reading specific to this assessment task.
What we saw in the student work was evidence of their new-found knowledge of these design thinking terms, and how that knowledge was beginning to transform their view of the designed world...ultimately with the hopes that they might:
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| A mural in the middle school cafeteria space. |
As we assessed the student-designers’ work, and after doing some assessment calibration among the three of us instructors, what emerged was evidence that knowledge of the design thinking jargon had been empowering to the student-designers as they read the case study. It was empowering for them to see design thinking at work.
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| How does the knowledge transform your view of the designed world? |
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| Look at all those terms!! |
Reading their reflections on how design thinking impacted the designed world of the case study, and then reading the student-designers’ self-assessment, there was the sense that we had indeed made an impact.
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