Section 0: Welcome to Designing for Documentation & Assessment
While making has many benefits for students, one of the greatest challenges of implementing making in K–12 schools is the question of how to assess collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and iterative making practices and outcomes. Many existing assessment tools for maker-centered classrooms focus on a final project or portfolio. The Beyond Rubrics toolkit is our first attempt at capturing qualitative and quantitative evidence during the process of making.
Beyond Rubrics toolkit was created by the MIT Playful Journey Lab and Maker Ed, in collaboration with educators at Community Public Charter School in Charlottesville, Virginia and Corte Madera School in Portola Valley, California. To download the customizable tools, as well as teachers guides for each tool, visit the Beyond Rubrics Toolkit site.
How to Use This Guide
In this guide, you’ll find a series of activities we have developed with tips on implementing them yourself. The guide is divided into five sections, which you can see in the top navigation bar:
- Section 0, Welcome to Designing for Documentation & Assessment: This section introduces the guide, and includes recommended paths you can take to explore the guide with colleagues. It also introduces the Beyond Rubrics Design Principles that frame how our team thinks about assessment in maker-centered classrooms.
- Section 1, Setting Context: Educators and learners to build a common understanding of the learning constructs, fully participate together in the assessment process, and collect rich evidence that supports teaching and learning. In this section you’ll try an activity to define your learning constructs and build a collective understanding among educators and learners in your classroom or program.
- Section 2, Evidence Collection: In this section, you will have the opportunity to try some of the tools to collect diverse evidence of learning in your classroom or makerspace and try your hand at designing an evidence collection tool.
- Section 3, Interpretation & Communication: Now that you’ve collected evidence of learning, you’ll want to use the evidence to make claims about student learning. In this section, we’ll share some of our prototypes for making meaning from the evidence.
- Next Steps: This section prompts you with next steps you might take in your assessment journey including links to several other resources and projects you can explore.
For each section of this guide you will find two activities to help you implement, adapt, and remix the Beyond Rubrics Toolkit. These will appear in the left navigation bar:
- Try the Toolkit (TTT): These activities will help you implement and reflect on the existing tools in the Beyond Rubrics Toolkit.
- Design Your Own (DYO): These activities will help you use the Beyond Rubrics design principles to adapt and remix the tools for your own context.
Additional Resources:
While this guide will help you get up and running with the Beyond Rubrics tools and principles, it is not a comprehensive introduction to making as pedagogy, assessment and Evidence Centered Design, or as comprehensive as what we hope to have one day after we’ve learned more and had a more sustained co-design process with a classroom. We encourage you to explore these additional resources for more ideas.
If you are just getting started on your maker education journey, there are a number of great resources from our friends and partners for thinking more deeply about the goals and practices in your community.
- MakerEd’s website features a wide range of curated resources for schools and institutions on their Getting Started page. You might start by exploring the “why” and “how” with the Visioning Tool.
- Informal education institutions are encouraged to check out the Making & Learning open online course from IMLS & the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.
- Many of the principles in this guide are based on those of Evidence Centered Design, which you can read more about in this Introduction to Evidence Centered Design from the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning.