Communicating computational concepts and practices within high school students’ portfolios of making electronic textiles

ABSTRACT

Portfolios have recently gained traction within computer science education as a way to assess students’ computational thinking and practices. Whereas traditional assessments such as exams tend to capture learning within artificial settings at a single point in time, portfolios provide more authentic opportunities to document a trajectory of students’ learning and practices in everyday contexts. Furthermore, because communication itself has been defined as an important computational thinking practice, portfolios give students a place to practice this skill in the classroom. In this study, we report on the implementation of a digital portfolio with a class of 21 high school students used to capture the process of creating of an electronic textile mural project. While students’ understanding of computational concepts were only partially captured within the portfolios, their engagements with computational practices – such as debugging and iteration – were better highlighted. Much of this was due to the students’ existing communicative strategies themselves, both in terms of how precise they were in describing issues, as well as how they leveraged images and code to explain their process. Recommendations for designing more effective portfolio assessments are discussed, which include greater emphasis on creating shared classroom discourse, and leveraging students’ existing experiences with multimedia.

KEYWORDS:

• Computational thinking
• portfolios
• assessments
• computational practices
• communication

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant # 1509245, 1512760, 1510725 from the National Science Foundation to Yasmin Kafai, Jane Margolis, and Joanna Goode. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania, or Utah State University. Special thanks to Breanne Litts and Sari Widman for their work on the original study workshop, from which this paper was generated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Debora Lui is a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate School of Education in the University of Pennsylvania.

Justice T. Walker is a Graduate Student at the Graduate School of Education in the University of Pennsylvania.

Sheri Hanna is the STEM Coordinator and life sciences teacher at the String Theory School in Philadelphia, PA.

Yasmin B. Kafai is the Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education in the University of Pennsylvania.

Deborah A. Fields is an Associate Research Professor of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University.

Gayithri Jayathirtha is a Graduate Student at the Graduate School of Education in the University of Pennsylvania.

ORCID

Debora Lui http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3455-2949

Justice T. Walker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4356-0396

Sheri Hanna http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6696-4692

Deborah Fields http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1627-9512

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1509245, 1512760, 1510725.