Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 2792: A Qualitative-Quantitative Evaluation Model for Systematical Improving the Creativity of Students` Design Scheme (Sustainability)

For teaching architectural design, if creativity in students’ practice assignments can be effectively evaluated, it will help make certain the ranking of the performance of different design schemes and provide a critical decision basis for the continuous improvement of each scheme. Based on the review of related literature, this study integrates the grounded theory (GT) from the social sciences’ domain and the method of multiple attribute decision making (MADM) from operations research by analyzing their advantages and congruence to create a qualitative–quantitative evaluation model such as the GT-DANP-mV (GT, DEMATEL-based analytic network process [ANP] with modified VIKOR) model. Then, the characteristics and advantages of this evaluation model were examined by applying it to empirical research. Overall, this evaluation model fully utilized the advantages of the analytical techniques of GT and the MADM method to solve the corresponding problems at different stages of the evaluation study, which realizes their complementary advantages. More crucial is that, whether in the related evaluation study or practice assignments, the application of the GT-DANP-mV model could facilitate the formulation of continuous improvement strategies for architectural design schemes based on performance evaluation results under conditions of limited resources.