Work In Progress - Development of a Design Task to Assess Students' Understanding of Human-Centered Design

Developing a human-centered approach to design is vital to appropriately preparing graduates for the globally competitive workplace. An important facet of education is assessment. We are developing a design task to assess students' skills in doing, feelings toward, and knowledge about human-centered design. This assessment tool could be used not only by educators, but also by researchers to characterize changes in students' understanding of human-centered design. The assessment task is informed by findings from a phenomenographic study that identified and described dimensions of variation in students' understanding of human-centered design as well as a literature review and comparison of how design has been studied. A goal of this assessment tool is to make a student's understanding of human-centered design easily observable through oral communication or artifact development, and provide insights into how students value the user as an inclusive partner throughout the design process.