Making judgements about students making work: Lecturers' assessment practices in art and design

What I read

In this article, the authors investigate the way educators view and critique student work. They focus on the language used to describe the work, and identify three themes related to quality in assessment: showing learning over time, showing "effective studentship", and presenting meaningful work.

The authors begin by presenting an overview of literature related to pedagogical considerations in art and design studio. This increasingly focuses on the role of language used in creative teaching and learning. The authors relate this to the push in academia towards providing learning outcomes and assessing to them, but that this is at odds with how many artists view art and design—that it is un-assessable in its subjectivity. They reference the book "Why Art Cannot Be Taught," and "rhetorical criteria," and arrive at the idea that art and design education is a "kind of exchange."

The authors explain that the goal of their study is to understand and "bring out, record and analyze the process of judgement making to establish the key indicators of quality" used during art and design grading.

As the authors explain their methodology, they reference the challenges of researching grading, because it is tacit and "leaves no trace." They describe their approach as leaning heavily on unique contexts (how each school or department manages assessment), and justify the use of think-aloud protocol and conversation analysis through grounded theory in making sense of the gathered data.

The authors then describe the themes that emerged, repeated here:

• The demonstration of significant learning over time;
• The demonstration of effective studentship;
• The presentation of meaningful art/design work

First, reviewers leveraged previous knowledge they had of a student as they assessed that student's work. They considered the output in the larger context of student growth. They also look for evidence that students lived up to their role as students: in conducting broad exploration, finishing their work, and listening to feedback and acting on it. Finally, reviewers look for some sort of clear, honest, or obvious meaning—that a viewer can understand the intent without having to really think about what they were viewing.

The authors examine the value of this text. Quality is related to the journey of a student over time, rather than the output of the journey. This is related to the relationship the student has with their work, with the instructor, and with the process of making things. This is in conflict with an output-focused (noun) approach to assessment, and is illustrative of an "assessment dilemma" about how we set up teaching and grading experiences.

Assessment on either output or process is vague and students are left to interpret measures of quality. This "fuzziness is relatively uncontentious in the field of art and design but is more problematic for those who may be seeking total transparency."

The authors conclude that "in art and design a binary that divides assessment for learning and assessment of learning may not apply."

What I learned and what I think

The metric of personal growth in a program is one effective way of understanding if real learning is happening, and comparing a student's ability at the beginning to their ability at the end of a long-term study provides a pretty obvious view of growth or lack of progress. This would mean that some sort of a comparable would have to exist in both places, be "saved" so it can be compared, and there would have to be continuity between the people involved in the assessing. It also puts a really, really direct focus on the noun, not the verb, and is almost entirely portfolio based. Most problematic, though, would be the lack of measure against becoming actually good at the work. If you sucked at the beginning, and you suck less at the end, that is Not A Good Outcome.

I think I've been lucky in never having to assess art, or styling in design absent user-centered criteria. The basics of assessment in design are pretty straight-forward and can be written down fairly well. I think I punted in my form classes; unless the work was really grotesque, I could grade based on process milestones (number of sketches, hitting deadlines, measures of finish and attention to detail) and leave the subjectivity to the non-graded, but more valuable, conversations.

I'm struggling with putting useful thoughts down on this one, not because I didn't gain from it, but because I'm all jumbled around them. I need a visual on this, so I'll do some more mapping.