Maker Process Portfolios: Looking at How Students Document Interdisciplinary E-Textiles Projects Within Digital Portfolios

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

Abstract

One advantage of maker education is that students can create personally relevant projects—meaningful contexts in which to learn new domains and skills. When thinking about how to assess this activity however, teachers are often left with the task of judging final products, without attending to the process students carry out to implement ideas. This is particularly important given that articulating and reflecting on moments of struggle often provide the greatest opportunities for learning (Kapur, 2008)—something not usually apparent in final artifacts, but potentially captured by portfolios.

Portfolios have long been used as an assessment tool in disciplines such as art and design (e.g., Gardner, 1989), and more recently in engineering, computer science, and making (e.g., Heinrich, Bhattacharya, and Rayudu, 2007; Peppler et al., 2015). In making however, participants often find themselves working at the intersection of multiple domains with which they have little experience. Here, we ask two questions to identify the affordances and potential challenges of using portfolios to assess interdisciplinary maker experiences: (1) What can portfolios reveal about students’ nascent making process across different disciplines; (2) How do students communicate this process, considering their limited knowledge and familiarity in these fields?

To answer our questions, we conducted an electronic textiles maker workshop with a class of 23 high school STEM students at a public charter school in a northeastern city. During fifteen 90-minute sessions, student pairs designed and stitched an electronic textile mural display—the process of making which they documented in digital portfolios. While students were given a general content outline, they were free to use any style and materials they wished. We examined the portfolios for how students described their process of making and the ways they communicated this narrative.

Students’ description of their process primarily fell into two categories: challenges encountered and revisions made. Challenges, which often fell into one domain, were mentioned much more often than revisions, which often fell across multiple domains. Students’ communication styles also varied across two main elements: supporting resources and language used. Students differed in their use of resources—while all students used project photographs or code excerpts, only some worked to annotate these with captions or visuals. Students also varied in language, using either highly specific descriptions—comprehended only by people very familiar with their project, or vague and ambiguous language—which could not easily be used to assess their understanding. Only a few students worked to strike a balance between these two extremes.

Our analysis provides insights about using portfolios to highlight maker processes. It revealed what students focused on regarding their process, as well as how their communicative styles potentially limited what was captured, and therefore what could be used in assessment. Our findings therefore highlight the need to support student’s ability to articulate their work, both textually and visually, within different domains. While often reinforced within discipline-specific portfolio work, familiarity with domain vocabulary and communication strategies remains to addressed within making contexts. Only by doing this can we realize the potential afforded by process-based maker portfolios.

Authors

• Debora Lui, University of Pennsylvania

• Justice Toshiba Walker, University of Pennsylvania

• Gayithri Jayathirtha, University of Pennsylvania

• Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania