Introduction
In our research, we used four main methods. Our team conducted background research which included our class reading assignments, webinars and guest speaker presentations.
Background Research
In the phase of background research, a lot of the readings and webinars informed us of the role of portfolios in with students today. Because portfolios are in the realm of educations, we know this topic is in a very complicated space with a lot at stake which is also known as a “wicked problem.”
Literature Review
About Documentation
“There’s process work and messy work — we want to share and celebrate messy process work and how to do that in a way that is sensitive to audiences… how do we handle this?” [Lewis_Nick, Senior Practitioner Specialist and Teacher, Project Zero]
“Portfolios need to help younger people document their work and tell their own story. [Kim_Annie, Director of Digital Learning, DreamYard]”
“Making a portfolio enables students to iterate several times and learn from failures.” [Megan, Cicconni, Director of Instructional & Innovative Leadership at Fox Chapel Area School District]
“A primary purpose [for a portfolio] is to support learning directly, with learning being defined primarily by the individual learner.” [Darren Cambridge, Eportfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment]
About Critiques
“Critiques help novices to understand key principles in a domain, to compare alternatives, to articulate the goals behind their work, and to recognize how others perceive their work. “ [Structuring, Aggregating, and Evaluating Crowdsourced Design Critique]
“A critique-based environment fosters personally relevant learning because it focuses on improving skills and processes rather than on earning points towards the highest grade.” [CritViz: Web-Based Software Supporting PeerCritique in Large Creative Classrooms]
About Reflection
“Reflection-in-action consists of action sequences such as observing a drawing, transforming it, and, observing the result, discover “certain unintended consequences” of the transformation move.” [Design as Reflective Practice]
Lecture Notes
From the lectures, we created the user profile insight boards:
You can download them here: https://goo.gl/EocIHb
We collected the information that we knew about portfolios and created an ecosystem map that visualized stakeholders. From the information we had collected, we knew that one big reason portfolios were important were because they were able to show student work and process in a way that final pieces can’t show. These details help evaluators and other reviewers further understand the student which led us to create a student centered model. Out of our background research, we wanted to focus on how we could create an experience for students to celebrate individual stories of student projects.
Standard Interview
For our standard interview, we prepared a user protocol for our interviews. We found six undergraduate and graduate students whose studies ranged from fine art to writing to design and architecture.
Link to protocol for standard interviews: https://goo.gl/ps1nnb
We created four user profile insights boards from the information we gathered from our interviews:
Please download them here: https://goo.gl/WgqsnR
Guerilla interviews
At the Makerfaire Education Day, we knew that students and teachers would be busy attending workshops throughout the available two hours so that means we would only have time for short interviews which meant guerrilla research. Because we knew that we would potentially have access to both students and teachers, we created separate questions. For students, we wanted to know about personal experiences related to portfolios and projects. For teachers, we prepared some higher level questions regarding challenges, goals, and motivations around portfolio practices. Interview questions
We conducted guerrilla interviews with 3 teachers and 7 middle school students and and collected 11 survey results from middle school students.
Link to protocol for user testings at Makerfaire: https://goo.gl/r0zZZG
We created one user profile insights board from the interviews:
Please download them here: https://goo.gl/vlq2Mz
Survey
We also sent out survey at the Maker Faire. Our survey questions help us understand how students feel about portfolios. We developed our questions by reviewing other surveys to give us a basis for writing unbiased questions. With the help of our mentors, we went through a couple drafts before we arrived at a version that we were happy with. Our final survey included some questions to give us demographic information as well as some questions around students feelings around portfolio related statements.
Link to the survey: https://goo.gl/csnDsQ
Synthesis
From all the information we gathered from our research, we wanted to be able to synthesize our information in a usable model format. According to the creator and an expert in contextual inquiry, Holtzblatt and Beyer push for the use of model creation and affinity diagramming to maintain a shared understanding amongst teams. Our team decided to create a sequence model for our portfolio experts to consolidate information related to college and university level student portfolio information.
This model consolidates the information we gathered from three student interviews. The model expresses motivations and tools that fuel the portfolio making process. Then it describes the anatomy of current student portfolios from brought categories down to the gritty structural parts of each digital portfolio.
By using affinity diagram, we wanted to develop user derived insights from all the information we gathered during our research process.
Based on the user study results, we created the following table for educators, students and experts in terms of goals, needs, opportunities and challenges.
Insights
Our team found patterns in our user data to create these insights:
- Documentation makes students more likely to be successful
- Documentation helps student reflect on previous work and figure out what to tackle next
- Documentation platforms vary by subject and availability
- Students share their work amongst classmates, teachers, and family
Personas
In About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, the reading mentions that personas should give designers different points of view from motivations to goals to consider in the design process. We created four personas as composite archetypes from our user derived data. Because we felt like our personas were too complex to be mapped out on a 2D axis, we decided to represent our personas in a venn diagram format.
We felt that there were three important elements in our personas. Whether or not they considered documentation to be important, whether students were using multimedia tools and whether or not students shared experiences.
Design Insights & Inspirations
Expert Insights
Overall, we found that undergraduate and graduate students, who we consider to have portfolio expertise, use this format of documentation to showcase their theses and skills to employers, prioritizing their end product over their process. They struggle more in deciding what content to show to potential employers and have issues with the technical aspects of documentation.
Student Insights
Middle school students, who are our primary user group, require an introduction to documenting their progress and the motivation to document. They are not necessarily going to see documentation as a way to get into college and have rarely had a reason to document their process outside of some school assignments. Self motivation is rare amongst these users, so motivation is an important aspect to consider for them.
Teacher Insights
Due to the young age of the user group, our secondary users, teachers are put in a precarious position. Teachers have difficulty balancing the new movement with policies and the standardization of schools, while also being bombarded with tools that do not interconnect or prioritize education. Rather, in trying to be broad, these tools make it harder for students to navigate and teachers to evaluate. A system built more for the students’ benefit can incorporate the documentation process into teachers’ programs.
Inspirations
Taking Stephanie Chang’s article “Chapter 6: Platforms for Recording, Storing, and Sharing”, into consideration, we looked at “fun” and interactive elements that can be brought into our product to engage students. We want them to be able to use a range of tools from Instagram like gifs and special effects in videos in order to express themselves and relay their progress throughout the “making” process. We want to combine elements from Medium for its article format and Google Drive for its interconnectivity of resources.
Learning Opportunities and Outcomes
We think this platform can be an informal place for students to regularly document their progress, share with friends and show student progress which in turn fosters a growth mindset.
