By Dave DeFusco

In a workshop on “Assessing Failure and Iteration in Student Work” at the 2025 KEEN National Conference in Austin, two UNC educators illuminated the challenges of evaluating student work beyond the final product and provided insights into emerging assessment methods that promote an entrepreneurial mindset.

“One of the primary challenges instructors face is distinguishing between students who engage in meaningful experimentation but produce a rough final product and those who put in minimal effort yet produce a similar outcome,” said Anna Engelke, who co-led the workshop and is BeAM’s education program manager. “On the surface, both projects may appear incomplete, but their underlying processes differ significantly. To accurately assess student learning, instructors must examine the articulation of the student’s journey—their reflections, design choices, iterations and problem-solving strategies.”

Engelke and Cameron McClellan, research assistant in the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at UNC-Chapel Hill, structured the workshop around a hands-on prototyping activity with predetermined “points of failure.” Participants were tasked with designing and prototyping shoes, only to encounter unexpected obstacles that forced them to iterate and rethink their designs.

“This exercise demonstrated the emotional and cognitive challenges students face when encountering failure in real-world design scenarios,” said McClellan. “More important, it underscored how rigid assessment frameworks—such as pass/fail rubrics—fail to capture the value of iteration and problem-solving.”

Design and making projects are inherently iterative, requiring students to experiment, take risks and learn from failure. However, traditional assessment methods—especially summative rubrics focused solely on the final artifact—often fail to account for the learning that occurs throughout the process.

The facilitators emphasized that by fostering a flexible, iterative assessment approach, instructors can better support student learning and development. Participants assessed their prototypes using a range of rubrics, beginning with the most restrictive—a single-point, pass/fail rubric. In this model, students either met the design criteria—e.g., walking in the shoe for 45 seconds—or failed outright. This rigid structure highlighted the limitations of binary assessment and how it discourages risk-taking and iteration.

The facilitators then introduced an analytic rubric, a more flexible approach that assigns numerical values to different criteria. For example, a shoe that functioned for 30 seconds might receive a score of three out of five. While an improvement over pass/fail models, analytic rubrics still fail to capture how students apply feedback and refine their designs over time.

To address these limitations, Engelke and McClellan introduced emerging assessment methods such as Creativity and Progress Rubrics and mastery-based learning. These frameworks assess students on a continuum, recognizing that learning and skill-building extend beyond the boundaries of a single project or semester. By emphasizing growth and iteration, these methods align more closely with an entrepreneurial mindset and the realities of the design process.

The workshop concluded with a discussion on how assessment methods should support lifelong learning. Unlike rigid grading systems that treat learning as a finite process, emerging rubrics encourage students to view their work as part of a broader continuum of skill development.

“By shifting away from purely summative assessment, instructors can create an environment where students are rewarded for persistence, creativity and problem-solving,” said Engelke. “While final grades may still be necessary, they should reflect not only the end product but also the iterative journey that led to it.”

February 25, 2025