Let Students Drive: Using Constructive Alignment for Assessment

You might recognise this moment: a student's work is heading somewhere that isn't working, and your instinct is to step in, to take the mouse, or draw over the work, rather than let the struggle play out. The instinct is well-meaning, and designing for students to show them how to design is a legitimate technique, but it can also work like steering for a learner driver, taking away the very process that produces learning.

Drawing on the constructive alignment chapter from her forthcoming book Design Studio Assessments (Bloomsbury, 2027), Anitra Nottingham argues that well-designed assessment can do more teaching work for by providing more opportunities for structured practice. More controversially, she suggests that assessment in the design studio doesn't always need to take the form of a polished design piece — and that other assessment types, such as quizzes, may be able to teach design more effectively than we tend to give them credit for.

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Anitra Nottingham is a designer, educator, and writer. She graduated from the Graphic Design program at Monash University and holds an MPhil from the University of Melbourne's Graduate School of Education, where her thesis examined how design studio practices are transformed as design education moves online.

She is currently an Academic Curriculum Developer at the University of Melbourne and was previously Senior Learning Designer and Head of Course Design at RMIT University Online. Earlier in her career, Anitra worked as a book designer for Oxford University Press and Penguin Books, as Creative Director at a boutique San Francisco design studio and later at a large technology company in the Bay Area. For many years she was Online Director and Co-chair of the School of Graphic Design and Digital Media at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, where she taught research methods, design history, typography, and information design.

Anitra is co-author of The Graphic Design Process (Bloomsbury, 2019) and, with her co-host, of Back to Font (Laurence King, 2025), which is based on their typography podcast, The Type Pod. She is author of the forthcoming Design Studio Assessments, from Bloomsbury in February 2027.

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Futures of Design Education is a discussion and presentation series organised by the DRS Education SIG - the second Friday of each month. Anyone interested in any aspect(s) of design education is welcome to come along.

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