At the Design Educators Conference at Pivot, Stacie Rohrbach, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design, led a very interactive and informative workshop on the ‘A-word’ — Assessment.

Rohrbach invited her workshop participants to rethink how, why and what we assess. She discussed how evaluation processes can cause students to become overly focused on grades, view assessments as discrete endpoints and eventually lead students to be disinterested in the assessment process. Rohrbach also revealed flaws in the use and communication of assessment requirements at an administrative level on campuses. Workshop participants were led through group activities in which the following topics were analyzed:

• Learning objectives
• Learning Outcomes
• Instructional Activities
• Performance Measures
• Assessments
• Evaluations

The most important questions Rohrbach asked of her participants was, ‘How can we design assessments to match the way we work?’, ‘How can we design assessments to reflect an effective learning cycle?’ and ‘How can we design assessments to reveal learning patters?’ Rohrbach presented some of her solutions for assessment tools and encouraged workshop participants to consider more visual and interactive tools that can be meaningful to students, instructors and administrators.

View Workshop Video: Stacie Rohrbach: Assessment in Design Education