This article provides an overview of the current trends in assessment practice within the field of graphic design. The demands placed on educators to apply sound assessment practice for Higher Education subjects is as intense in the field of graphic design as in any other. Forcing the assessment of creative visual work into existing assessment methodologies is incongruous and is often, for good reason, met with resistance from lecturers in this field. Practical art and design modules tend to fall outside of the recognised assessment methodologies as the type of skills and thinking that students must evidence are difficult to define. Lecturers, in order to encouraging creativity, prefer to leave outcomes open ended in order to accommodate the unexpected and unique solutions that students are encouraged to achieve. This and the atypical assessment approaches taken in design subjects make justifying assessment practice to the various role players challenging. In this article current trends that make assessment more transparent, encourage deep learning and give the opportunity to assess not only the final artefact, but the creative process and the development of the learner as a design practitioner, are identified.These approaches can provide lecturers with the basis for building sound 2 assessment structures and empowering them to clearly justify their assessment practice.Keywords: assessment practice, authentic assessment, deep learning, outcomesbased education, creative process, learner-centredness, constructive alignment, holistic assessment IntroductionThis article deals with the assessment of creative work in a higher education graphic design context and identifies a number of current assessment approaches specific to the creative arts. The appropriateness of these approaches is considered in relationship to what needs to be assessed in a creative field such as graphic design and how it should be assessed. The fact that assessment is one of the keystones in teaching and learning in higher education and is under pressure to be transparent, fair, accurate and cost effective cannot be ignored. As pressure for accountable assessment -keeping all role players in mind -increases the approach that lecturers take to the assessment of creative work needs to be defined and substantiated. Assessment in the Creative ArtsMost design courses have very thorough structures and processes for assessment, which generally include documented learning outcomes and assessment criteria.However, most teams of lecturers and individuals marking assignments and being involved in external moderation of final portfolios, have, at one time or another, had queries relating to how work was assessed and these queries, on occasion, escalate to involve individuals and groups who have no knowledge of education or the subject area. Explaining to lay people, such as students and parents, how creative visual pieces are marked is often problematic. As lecturers operating in a learner-centred, outcomes-based higher education system, the descri...

No abstract

Providing a cohesive language for graphic design, which can be utilized in the production of knowledge and the generation of theory specific to that sub-discipline of Art and Design, is a challenge that is often obscured by the very practical nature of the field. As practice-based problem-solving is at the core of graphic design, application often supersedes meta-level theoretical engagement when it comes to educating undergraduate students. In this article, the underlying structures of graphic design pedagogy are explored through sociology of knowledge theories. We demonstrate how these theories enable the identification and analysis of those underlying structures, both epistemic and social, which influence how knowledge and the knower is constructed, taught and assessed in this sub-discipline. Applying these knowledge-knower structuring theories to analyses of empirical data collected from curriculum documentation and assessment events, we draw comparisons with data generated from formative and summative assessment practices. It is our intention that, through articulating a language of description and providing this example of the application of such methodological procedures for investigating such knowledge, a cohesive language may be shared that holds the potential to better inform curriculum development of the sub-discipline in higher education.

In this article we investigate the student experience of risk-taking in an open-ended design project that appeared to be ideally suited to encourage risk-taking. The article is informed by a phenomenological case study documenting student experience of risk-taking during a concentrated, week-long design project. The data revealed multiple instances where students had taken risks and how they had experienced risk-taking. Three significant aspects of risktaking in design education were identified in the data and explored. The first aspect considers how the students' experience correlated with a theoretical educational approach that encourages risk-taking. The second provides a broad overview of the students' experience of risk-taking during the project. The third draws out common student experiences that highlight that risk-taking is often prompted by the undefined and unexpected elements of a project and gaps in student knowledge, experience and skills.