To develop an assessment tool for the evaluation of designs in fashion design education

Universities offering graduate degrees with fashion design curriculum training the fashion designers needed by the fashion clothing sector.Determination of the efficacy of existing practices in education in reaching the targets, whether or not the desired changes have occurred in the students and the level of change, identification and solution of problems if any, and motivation, improvement and sustaining the achievements require an effective measurement and review.That design and thus design education is based on creativity, one of the most difficult concepts to understand; that design problems have infinite number of accurate answers in the form of ideas, drawings or products, and the requirement to use multidimensional skills in identifying these accurate answers together make measurement and assessment harder. It is not possible to measure design performance which requires multidimensional and sophisticated skills by classical measurement approaches, also named as pencil/paper tests. This makes measurement the subject of performance measurement, an alternative measurement method, in design education. Rubric/grading scales, score cards or checklists are the most used measurement tools in performance measurement.In design education, studio courses are course synthesizing design programs, where the students are required to use the design-related knowledge and skills they have acquired in solving design problems together. And the studio courses during the final year of the study offer the highest level of learning, thus are the courses students are expected to demonstrate their performance at the highest level in solving the design problem/problems. Final exams (end-of-semester exams) of these courses are exams where the design process is completed and students? performance aimed at design is measured as a whole. The most important performance outcomes in the final exams are two-dimensional and three-dimensional products. In this context, the fundamental purpose of this study have been the identification of performance assessment tools, criteria and assessment approaches in colleges offering fashion design education, and the development of a assessment tool in assessing and evaluating the designs, which are an important dimension of student performance in final year studio courses.This study is a case study in its objective, methods followed in reaching that objective and recommendation of a new measurement tool. The study samples consist of 22 lecturers and last year students who attended works of assessment of measurement toll, chosen by criterion sampling method, working in six universities in Turkey. Quantitative and qualitative data gathering techniques were used together in obtaining the study data. Statistical analysis methods were applied in analyzing the quantitative data, and content analysis method was applied in analyzing the qualitative data of the study.In the fashion design education studio courses, some of the results found in line with the study findings are that the jury approach is mostly adopted as a assessment approach; two-dimensional and three-dimensional products consisted of the most important performance dimension of the final exam; performance criteria aimed at three-dimensional products were originality, innovation-distinction, suitability with the theme, suitability for the target group, aesthetic, functionality, production quality, consistency with the logic of collection, suitability for industrial production under the fundamental criteria of creativity. Reliability, validity and usefulness qualities were also tested applying the devised measurement tool. As a result of these tests, it was found that it had acceptable qualities.