Research Phase Insights and Implication
Part2: Insights for the design phase
From our research phase, we have generated the following insights for the design phase.
Documentation can help assessments, feedback, and showcase.
Documentation of the work process can have multiple benefits for students’ learning and for the instructor’s teaching. First of all, it can help the assessment process, making the assessment more explicit and less subjective. The instructor can easily track what the student groups have done and then assess their progress and effort. The explicit process can also address the concern of the school administrator so that she can see clearly see the assessment process.
In addition, the documentation of the work process can also help instructors give personalized, targeted feedback to the students. Based on the feedback, students can make improvements in their work and transfer their skills to different settings. With proper documentation of the work process, students can also showcase not only their work outcome but also their work process to others. In our design, we should consider how the tool that we design can help address all of these different areas.
Documentation of the work process can provide sources for meta-cognitive reflection.
One of the most important learning goals of PBL courses and cognitive apprenticeship is that students will learn how to transfer their knowledge and skills to diverse settings. The documentation of the work process can help target this goal. With proper documentation, students can better learn from what they have done in the meta-procedural reflection process. Improvements in the documentation can help learners better achieve this learning goal in the PBL course.
Students need motivation for documentation.
Without motivation, students will not be actively documenting their work process. Currently, there is only one intrinsic motivation for the students to document that they want to keep their ideas. Therefore, students are only documenting their ideation. The current final showcase requirement is also not explicitly requiring students to show their work process, so they do not have the motivation to document their work process. Students need more motivation for them to better document their work. The motivations can be additional assessment requirements or intrinsic, personal motivations. For our design, we need to make sure that we can help students realize the importance of documentation by making the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards explicit.
Documentation tools should not interrupt the work process and should be easy to learn and use.
The smooth workflow in the PBL courses is very important for learners to complete their projects. Therefore, it is important that the documentation tool will not interfere with or interrupt the learners’ work process. Students also do not have much time to learn to use a complicated tool in this PBL course. Thus, the tool should be easy-to-learn and easy-to-use.
Students should learn when and how to document to better document their work process and therefore reflect on their work.
We also found that many students are not documenting their work process in a clear and organized manner because they do not know when and how to properly document their work for future reference or for reflection. As this course is probably one of the first PBL courses students take, students often lack the prior knowledge of how to document in PBL courses but the course instruction does not explicitly cover how to document. Therefore, we should consider how our design could teach students the proper approach to documentation.
With these throughout insights and implications, we have a clear direction to go with for the next phase.
