A-HA moment: Is documentation only for telling a story “later on”?

In interviewing instructors in user study 02, we found out an interesting situation — nearly all professors thought documentation is important but seldom of them really put emphasis on requesting students to do documentation.

I didn’t put too much emphasis on documentation. It is for telling a story later. What more important is to help students learn better.— Pro. Olivia

Documentation and doing projects are two world and will interfere with one another. — Prof. Daragh

It is true that students will find it hard to stop and document their work. Documentation is easy to forget and seems not so important compared to the work in progress. However, documentation is the key to improve students learning in the long-term and develop their learning into meta-cognition level. Documentation is never only a source pool for portfolios; also, it is not just an assessment tool for professors. Documentation is a process for students to self-reflect often, to learn from previous success and failure and to support their future study.

Documentation should be regarded as important as, or slightly more important than workings themselves. It is worthwhile to stop from work and record the process, any aha moments, the failure and the success. Collecting all materials and reviewing these moments later and trying to think “ how we can do better next time” ,“ what causes the failure/success”, “in which process we were wasting time”…. are all steps to promise deeper learning.