Instructional Design Students' Design Judgment in Action

This case study examines the design practices of instructional design ( ID) students while working on a realistic design project (Joel, 1987) to explore whether ID students make design judgments; how, when, and where they are making them; and what kinds of judgments they make during a realistic instructional design process. The perspective taken in this study is that design judgments comprise multiple, complex types and are not confined to moments of overt decision making (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012). In this small-scale case study, a group of students was observed in the process of designing instruction within a semester. The findings of the study suggest that these ID students continuously made design judgments of many kinds throughout the design process.