Communicating Effectively in Interior Design

SLO #3 Communicate Effectively Through the Clear and Accurate Use of Language

Jan Cummings Bobanne Kalkofen Darla Green Jo Randolph Dalene Irwin Presentation Created by D. Green

Our Research Question

 In regards to the student learning outcome #3:

Communicate Effectively Through the Clear and Accurate

Use of Language, our department wanted to prove if students ability to communicate effectively improved from the introduction class to the capstone class. Communication is a key component to interior design, making this outcome extremely important.

The Plan

 Our original thoughts were that most students come to our program with very little effective interior design communication and improved greatly over the courses of the program.

 First we established effective communication as verbal AND non verbal. We discussed what would be considered good acceptable and not acceptable forms of verbal and non verbal communication.

 Our plan was to create a baseline by measuring the students abilities to communicate.

Collect Data – The Tool

 We devised a rubric to use during presentations. This would become the tool for collecting data.

 Instead of starting from scratch – we set out to research rubrics which had already been used at other institutions.

 We found (2) two which seemed to have many of the categories we were looking to include.

 We rearranged, added too, removed from, and merged these two rubric into one we could use to measure effective communication.

Insert here: copies of rubrics we used as a referenc e

Collect Data – The Tool

 Insert original rubric here

Then the data spoke

 After using the rubric in as many classes as possible, we found crunched our data and found the following:  The students actually performed higher than we thought across the board accept for one category.

 We also found that our rubric was not covering everything we needed it to measure so we decided to revise the categories

What did we do about the data? What changes/steps did you take?

 First we revised our rubric to expand some of the categories to use in the future 

After looking at the data – we started modeling and explaining effective interior design communication in all classes.

Next Steps – what additional steps are you planning – any follow-up assessments?

 Our plan is to continue to use this rubric in all interior design courses.  This rubric has provided us with information as to where the students need more instruction.

 The rubric has made it easier for instructor to see and focus on problem areas in effective communication.