Youth Motivations for Open Maker Portfolios in School and Out-of-School Makerspaces

• In Event: Measuring Making: Methods, Tools, and Strategies for Capturing Learning, Participation, and Engagement in Maker Activities

Abstract

Objective: Challenging accountability discourses and standardized testing, portfolio assessment emerged to showcase the richness of learning (Mills, 1996). Portfolio assessment often showcases students’ best work and includes teacher-student conferences (Niguidula, 1993). Portfolios can be a start for designing assessments of interest-driven learning, like making, especially when maker portfolios are included into higher education and job applications (Peterson & Abelson, 2015). Portfolio assessment has been used in settings that are traditionally adult-driven, especially schools, and one challenge has been the amount of required adult scaffolding.

Perspective: Youth in non-school settings have started to create advanced portfolios online in support of future professional and educational opportunities (Peppler, Maltese, Keune, Change and Regalla, 2015). For example, colleges accept youth portfolios of online work and as a result, youth build online communities with thousands of followers (Peppler, Keune, and Chang, forthcoming). However, we know little about youths' motivations for portfolios and to what extent they align with the adult motivations for portfolios. By better understanding youth motivations, we aim to improve portfolio assessments across settings by serving adult and youth purposes. Taking a situative approach to motivation, which focuses on activity organization to support participation within society (Nolen et al., 2015), and portfolios to foster connected learning (Ito et al., 2013), we ask: what are youth motivations to capture making in out-of-school and in-school makerspaces? How do youth motivations parallel or conflict with adult motivations?

Data & Methods: Through a one-year-long qualitative inquiry of three makerspaces (out-of-school, high school, and elementary school) we facilitated 30-minute long portfolio walkthroughs with 29 youth, which combined usability testing (Rieman, Franzke, & Redmiles, 1995) and semi-structured interviews (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). Questions posed included “How did you capture this and why?” A sequence analysis (Carspecken, 1992) identified how portfolio supported youth to engage with others and mapped these to portfolio tool affordances.

Findings: We identified three categories of youth motivations: (a) being recognized by communities outside the makerspace, (b) trying roles to assume after leaving the makerspace, and (c) applying adult-driven principles for youth-driven portfolios. First, at the out-of-school environment, youth were motivated to capture their work as part of a participation in online communities that featured high level statistics about viewer interactions. Second, at the high school makerspace, youth were motivated to document making when portfolios supported them to try out who they could be beyond school. For example, youth shared their work in personal accounts associated with their names and in accounts associated to youth collectives. Third, at the elementary school, youth were motivated to capture when they could use adult-modeled portfolio practices as starting points for imitating youth-driven sharing genre, such as video-game-walkthroughs, and generating economic opportunities.

Significance: This work highlights youth portfolio motivations for captured youth projects beyond adult-instructions. These motivations suggest design features that could expand portfolio assessment to support wider youth-driven adoption of portfolios, setting the stage for wider scale portfolio assessments. This promises to sustain portfolio practices that create richer representations of making and afford assessment of youth’s roles within maker communities and beyond.

Authors

• Kylie A. Peppler, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Anna Keune, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Stephanie Chang, Maker Education Initiative