The development of pre-service design educator’s capacity to make professional judgments on design capability using adaptive comparative judgment

When design educators are faced with assessment tasks it is important they have a good personal construct of what it means to be capable in design education. The importance of allowing design students the facility to develop creative and innovative capacities is a priority. With standardised testing it is harder to allow for open ended and divergent projects to be facilitated and assessed. Adaptive Comparative Judgment is a dynamic assessment tool to facilitate and capture the complex iterative design process. The validity and reliability of adaptive comparative judgments as an assessment tool has been established by many in Design Education. This paper looks at the impact of A.C.J. on perspective design educators construct of design capability. An ACJ session was completed by 13 volunteers on 24 design portfolios without giving specific criteria. They had their own personal construct of capability based on a process of enculturation. During the study concurrent and retrospective commentaries by the participants were recorded to get an insight into their thinking during the decision making session. The study found there was consensus on what was evidence of capability in open ended design projects. Also it showed that engagement in the ACJ processes led to a further appraisal of what the perspective design educators construct of capability in design education. This prompts further investigation into the impact of the engagement in the ACJ on appraisal skills and the affect it has on a student’s metacognitive awareness of their construct of capability in design education.