Agency

• In Event: 31.044 - MakEval: Mixed Methods Approaches to Evaluating Making in Schools

Abstract

Agency is defined by the ways people author themselves, through both their individual identities and the ways they interact with others around them (Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cairn, 1998). One’s agency often reflects efforts to create change in one’s own life and community (Calabrese Barton & Tan 2010). Within making—a popular approach to teaching STEM through learner-driven projects where youth create anything from light-up greeting cards with paper circuitry to Rube Goldberg machines—such agency can become visible in the intentionality with which youth pursue an idea or plan, personalize projects and products, take intellectual and creative risks without a blueprint, persist through challenges, and direct their own learning (Bevan, Ryoo, & Shea, 2017; Clapp, Ross, Ryan, & Tishman, 2017; Petrich, Wilkinson, & Bevan, 2013; Wardrip & Brahms, 2015).
As educators increasingly recognize and value agency as a learning outcome of making, our project (MakEval) sought to design and test a series of assessment tools that educators could use to measure shifts in agency for their youth in making programs. This presentation describes details about how the “MakEval Agency Evaluation Toolkit” was created, vetted, and tested, with details about lessons learned and next steps for improving and disseminating the toolkit.
Sociocultural theories inform how we define agency in educational contexts, where learning occurs through social interactions over time, as influenced by both concrete and abstract cultural artifacts we use to make meaning in the world (e.g., language, tools, ideas, etc.; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, del Rio, & Alvarez, 1995). As such, the suite of educator tools created to support measuring youth agency in making are focused on describing shifts in youth’s perceptions of their projects and selves over time, toward reflecting the various ways they see themselves as authors of their own ideas, creations, and lives. The Evaluation Toolkit includes ways for educators to support youth in creating portfolios (that allow youth to author their own stories of agency with making projects over time), interviews (that educators can conduct with youth, or youth can conduct in peer-to-peer conversations), surveys (that capture snapshots of youth perspectives on their own senses of agency before and after a making project), and post-project reflections (that allow youth to voice the ways they see their sense of agency at the end of creating a project).
In this study, we collected data (in the form of surveys and interviews) from educators working in a range of different making contexts (e.g., museums, afterschool programs, in-school classrooms, etc.) about the content and structure of the toolkit. After improving on the toolkit based off of this data, a second round of data collection was conducted in which educators tested various aspects of the toolkit in their making contexts, sharing student work, completed assessments, survey feedback, and interview data about their experiences implementing the MakEval Agency Evaluation Toolkit.
This Presentation describes details about how the various toolkit assessments support measuring shifts in agency for youth through making, as well as limitations to the assessments efficacy in documenting such growth.

Author

• Jean J. Ryoo, University of California - Los Angeles