Supporting Iterative Critique: The Design, Development, and Testing of an Online Critique Tool for Makers

• In Event: 65.057 - The Maker Movement in Education

Abstract

Makerspace learning environments often reflect a hybrid of formal studio arts classes, engineering design groups, and communities of practice (Sheridan, et al., in press). In each of these realms, the practices of critique are crucial to successful learning. Critique involves looking at work with others to provide careful description of the properties of the work, analysis of how the properties function together to communicate an idea to an audience or solve a problem, envisioning of other possible approaches and solutions, and evaluation of what has been done and which steps make the most sense to take next (Hetland, et al., 2013). Critique practices promote learning as students use the results of their critique experiences to build a series of successive representations that require both technical expertise and content understanding. These representations, in turn, develop students’ metarepresentational competence (MRC), the ability to know when to invoke representational tools to solve a given problem at a given time (diSessa, 2004). As a learning outcome, MRC has been used to demonstrate students’ knowledge in mathematics (Azevedo, 2000; Enyedy, 2005), science (diSessa, 2004), and art (Halverson, 2013). In this paper, we discuss a design project drawing on this literature on critique and from our previous comparative case studies of makerspaces (Sheridan et al., in press).
In collaboration with a software team, we created a critique support tool for making. In this paper we first discuss the design features of this critique support tool. In particular, we present a view of critique as embedded in, and an important driver of, an iterative design process. In our critique support tool, we use as our analytic unit a three step process: 1) a multimedia pitch where each maker has a workspace to document an idea, sketch, plan, or work in progress; 2) feedback where community members are randomly selected to respond to each others’ pitches in both open-ended and in structured ways, 3) revision, where makers adapt their pitch or product based on this feedback.
We then describe our findings from pilot testing with groups of adult makers who are part of a national effort to facilitate making for youth in diverse learning environments including makerspaces, schools, libraries, museums, and community centers. We discuss how the pilot testing informed our ongoing adaptations of the design of the tool and the critique support process, and our preliminary findings regarding the construction of pitches, types of feedback, and how these informed work revisions. We also focus on how critique might work to sustain engagement through the iterative process and develop meta-representational competence around the tools, techniques and processes of this interdisciplinary making.

Authors

• Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Kimberly Marie Sheridan, George Mason University