Towards a formal assessment of design literacy: Analyzing K-12 students' stance towards inquiry

•We present an assessment tool for measuring aspects of design literacy.•Design and analysis of an open-ended survey item with wicked characteristics.•We assess student's stance towards inquiry as an aspect of design literacy.•We provide evidence for student's lack of a designerly stance toward inquiry.

We present a tool for quantitative assessment of K-12 students' stance towards inquiry as an important part of students' development of design literacy. On a basis of design thinking literature, we position designerly stance towards inquiry as a prerequisite for engaging with wicked problems. The Design Literacy (DeL) assessment tool contains design of a qualitative survey question, a coding scheme for assessing aspects of a designerly stance towards inquiry, and a description of how, we have validated the results through a large-scale survey administration in K-12 education. Our DeL tool is meant to provide educators, leaders, and policy makers with strong arguments for introducing design literacy in K-12 schools, which, we posit, function within in an age of measurement.