Instructional Design Students’ Design Judgment in Action

Abstract

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.

Design Judgment in Data Visualization Practice

“…We build upon decades-old interest in phronesis-or the practical knowledge that underlies and supports the work of professionals [10,30]-and investigate how design judgment, a particular aspect of that professional engagement, aids a designer in confronting the complexity of real-world design situations and guides decision making [23]. This work builds upon prior investigation of design judgments in instructional design, where Boling and colleagues described the complex and layered nature of judgments in informing design practice [4,12] and design education [9].…”

Instructional design students’ design judgment development

“…Design judgments are clustered in the process, rather than being exercised in isolation or serially, and they are shaped by environmental factors (Gray et al, 2015). As the abilities of ID students progress, their intensity in making design judgment increases, and the types and frequencies of their design judgments change over time (Demiral-Uzan, 2015).…”

“…Attention to design judgment in ID has rapidly increased in the last decade (e.g. Boling et al, 2017a;Demiral-Uzan, 2015;Farmer & Koehler, 2022;Gray et al, 2015;Parsons et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2020). Very recently, the field has been discussing and defining learning experience design (LXD), which stresses the use of design methods informed by user experience design (Abbott, 2020;Chang & Kuwata, 2020;Jahnke et al, 2020;Korkmaz, 2018;Schmidt & Huang, 2022;Stefaniak & Sentz, 2020;Vann & Tawfik, 2020).…”