Identifying what matters in student learning

The Pittsburgh Maker Educator Learning Community connects educators from diverse educational settings interested in maker-based learning experiences. With guidance from researchers at Agency by Design (an initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Clapp et al., 2016), and with support from the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and the Quaker Valley School District, we sponsor professional development activities for 30 educators from 18 organizations throughout the Pittsburgh region. Our participants come from various content areas, they work at grade levels ranging from preK to high school, and they represent both traditional schools and informal educational spaces, including a library, museum, and after-school program.  

Initially, we came together to discuss and share effective ways to document student learning in maker-based experiences. But the more we talked about student assessment, the more complicated the topic became, leading us to wrestle with tricky questions about how best to define and measure the kinds of learning that matter to us. What would it look like, we wondered, to start from our own beliefs about what students need to know, rather than beginning with the narrow range of academic content and skills emphasized by state and district tests?