Supporting Metacognitive Awareness of the Process of Making: Portfolio Assessment in High School e-Textiles Classrooms

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

Abstract

One of the reasons that making has drawn so much attention from educators and policy makers in recent years is its potential for rich learning in solving problems that arise from the process of digital fabrication. Yet assessing learning in making has proven a challenge, in part because student creations are innately diverse and unique. Researchers have taken several different directions to assess student learning in making, each with affordances and limitations. Content tests allow researchers to document learning across multiple classrooms (e.g., Peppler & Glosson, 2013; Tofel-Grehl et al, 2017) but tend to limit what counts as learning to standards-based content valued in schools (i.e., circuitry or coding), discounting the processes of learning. Survey-based performance assessments apply across contexts of making but focus only on early stages of planning on challenges such as creating a blender (Blikstein et al, 2017). In contrast, case studies of student design processes (e.g., Kafai, Fields & Searle, 2014) and clinical interviews (e.g., Lee & Fields, 2013) show depth of learning and students’ uptake of process-based practices such as iteration and revision yet are time-consuming to do at large scales.

Here we share our initial efforts to develop assessments authentic to the context of making e-textiles but scalable to multiple classrooms. In 2017, we piloted an eight-week curriculum unit where students created electronic textiles (programmable circuits sewn with conductive thread) as part of the year-long Exploring Computer Science course. The unit included a final portfolio assignment where students reflected on and presented their own learning. The portfolio assignment served two main goals: 1) study student learning in a manner authentic to the creative making process, 2) support students’ metacognitive awareness as a type of equity-based learning (Darling-Hammond, 2008). Portfolios included three elements: a video summarizing how the final project worked, a reflection on a challenge that arose in making the final project, and a reflection on learning in the e-textiles unit as a whole. Three teachers from diverse schools in an urban center of California piloted the unit. Data consisted of four types: portfolio collection, interviews with select student focus groups, interviews and group discussions with teachers reflecting on the portfolios, and observation of two portfolio-creation days in each classroom.

Our analysis revealed the types of problems students identified in their portfolios and students’ reflections on their own learning. We identified the degree to which students were explicit (versus generic) in discussing the problems they faced. Further, students’ reflections on creating the portfolios revealed a new cognizance of their own learning process, pointing to the potential for the portfolios to support metacognitive awareness, though this was not universally present. Finally, teachers’ reflections demonstrated different interpretations of the portfolios’ value to students’ learning and as a classroom tool to assess students’ learning. In the full poster we consider the utility of the portfolio assignment to students, teachers, and researchers and suggest revisions for the e-textiles ECS unit as well as the potential of this type of process-based portfolio to other types of making scenarios.

Authors

• Deborah A. Fields, Utah State University

• Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

• Gayithri Jayathirtha, University of Pennsylvania