Learning design wisdom by augmenting physical studio critique with online self-assessment

Accurately assessing the quality of one’s work is a crucial skill for professional designers and design students alike. This paper describes teaching materials that help students self-assess their work in a design course at a large university in the US. Using these materials, students have been successful in evaluating themselves—in 69% of all weekly student submissions, self-assessed scores matched independent staff-assessments. Self-assessment accuracy also improved through the term (F (1, 1332) = 31.72, p < 0.001). This submission introduces a novel workflow for integrating studio feedback with self-assessment in design education and describes our experiences using this approach for the last three years with more than 400 students. Student success in self-evaluation suggests that techniques from these materials can be integrated into design environments elsewhere. We outline our plans to extend these materials for use with peer-evaluation and for assessments in large online design classes.