Digital Portfolio for Reflections on Formation

Project for Design Studio 2 (January 2020 - April 2020)

Summary

Over the course of this ~4-month design project, I designed a digital portfolio for Boston College undergraduate students who will be working on applied science projects with BC's new Schiller Institute for Integrated Science & Society. I specifically worked on a section in this portfolio dedicated to reflection on project experiences, which is designed to guide students through a reflective writing process that encourages them to critically think about their experiences. In particular, the reflective writing process is scaffolded to help students hone in on what they have learned about themselves from an experience through a formation lens: whole-person development, their strengths, their joys, their interests, who they want to become, and what they want to do. By providing the digital portfolio as a tool for fostering formation through reflective writing, this is an opportunity for BC to infuse its Jesuit tradition of formative education with the Schiller Institute, which hopes to develop its own tradition in the applied and interdisciplinary sciences.

Goals

• STEM undergraduate students at BC working on applied science projects with the Schiller Institute will learn about themselves in relation to formation (whole-person development, discovering strengths, joys, etc.) through reflecting and writing about their project experiences in a digital portfolio.

• Students will think critically about all aspects of their project experiences, including analyzing - not just describing - what happened and reflecting on how what happened might influence their future actions and outlooks.

• Students will understand the value of reflection and reflective writing, in that practicing reflection during their project can lead them to learn about themselves and how they are developing as students, professionals, and citizens. It will be a practice they will want to continue to do over time.

Context & Learners

• Context - The premise for this design grew out of discussions with Boston College's Center for Digital Innovation in Learning (CDIL), which is preparing to help shape the vision and mission of the new Schiller Institute for Integrated Science & Society, opening at BC around Fall 2020. As part of the new Schiller Institute, BC will be creating a variety of applied science and engineering programs aimed at helping undergraduate students become human-centered product and process designers. Over the course of their education at BC, students in these programs will work on a variety of projects in which they apply what they are learning about disciplines such as the health sciences and environmental science to solve real-world problems and address real-world design challenges.

• Learners - Undergraduate BC students majoring in a STEM field (biology, chemistry, physics, environmental science, computer science, etc.) interested in working on an applied science project with the Schiller Institute, and/or undergraduates in any of the newly-created Schiller programs, including Global Public Health and the Common Good and Human-Centered Engineering. A key operating assumption is that this target learner audience does not already engage regularly in reflection or other formation activities in their science classes and coursework.

Research

• I initially focused on three main areas of research to inform my design: formation (specifically, formation at BC), reflective writing, and digital portfolios. I found it helpful to synthesize across my findings in these three areas in order to identify key themes and common denominators that I could draw on to ensure I was addressing my learning goals. The Venn diagram below, from my design journal, shows this synthesis in a visual way.

Iteration 1: Paper Prototypes

Based on my learner population, the context, the learning goals, and my research, I developed a two main concepts for the digital portfolio that would drive the student experience of doing reflective writing:

1. Choosing templates, in the form of graphic organizers, to scaffold reflective writing

2. Following a scaffolded, sequential reflective writing process

I created some rough mockups of how these concepts might work together in the digital portfolio environment and what they might look like to a student user. As mentioned previously, I focused my design on the features of the portfolio that pertain to reflection, not the other areas of the portfolio that a student would use for keeping track of other details of their Schiller Institute project.

Though my aim was to eventually include both of these design concepts and related features/ interactions in a prototype, I first created paper prototypes of the just the templates for testing. This included two sets of 5 different types of graphic organizers: blank templates for testers to fill in, and templates filled in with a worked example of an experience/event that one might reflect on (images below). All template options are structured via shapes, headers, and prompts to encourage the writer to Look Back on their experience, Analyze the experience, and then Look Forward using what they have learned from the experience. This constitutes the sequential reflective writing process that I propose students follow.

Iteration 2: Digital Portfolio Prototype

Prototype accessible here: https://marvelapp.com/abcj20d

To build my prototype of the digital portfolio, I used Marvel App, a rapid prototyping platform for making wireframes. I chose this tool because of its options for prototyping websites, since the digital portfolio would be web-based and similar to interacting with a website. My digital prototype includes the following features and interactions:

• Portfolio home page

• Reflection section landing page

• Creating a new reflection entry - includes browsing and selecting templates, and adding to and editing the reflection entry

• A "Eureka!" tracker for keeping note of experiences/moments to reflect on later

• An "Ideas for Writing" page to give students examples of what they could reflect on and write about

• An example of a published entry (one that a student has completed)

Before creating the digital prototype, I critiqued my design using theoretical lenses: learning sciences theories and pedagogies applied in an evaluative way. This means taking what the theory/pedagogy says about how people learn and using that to examine how the design affects learning. For example:

• Case-Based Reasoning (Kolodner) supports my conjectures about how my design would strengthen mental model building by providing digital guidance/scaffolding for the reflective writing process. CBR says that cases exemplifying a mental model are stored with that mental model in memory; students will come to associate pieces of experiences that they wrote about with a certain part of the reflection process, and will eventually strengthen their mental model for the reflection process in addition to having more and more ideas of what to write about in the future during reflection.

  • Shortfall - Students may remember how think critically about an experience while reflecting by having strong examples to draw from, but the process itself does not guarantee learning about oneself from the experience, nor does it guarantee that the student will value the process and therefore be likely to engage in reflection in the future.

Engaging with this form of critique served as a way to "walk through" my design to see how my conceptual goals (about learning from experience) and my implementation goals (scaffolding features in the digital portfolio) work together, support each other, and lead to learning.

The most significant moments for me as a learning engineer designing this project occurred when I would get to incorporate work, ideas, and insights from my other Learning Engineering courses. Reflecting on it now, I can see how it all unfolded, and how one idea led to another:

1. CTA - helped me identify the phases of the reflection process, which informed which prompts are in the scaffolding

2. Observing Designs in Use - helped me identify the secondary learning goal of having students see the value in reflection

3. Motivation - helped me think more about how students seeing value, utility, and relevance in reflection activities connects to fundamental needs and motivation

4. Theory of Change - helped me think about the bigger picture of what values BC/Schiller wants to embody and who they want students to become

This has been one of the most exciting aspects of my journey to becoming a learning engineer: seeing how one idea not only leads to another for my project, but that I am able to make connections to my courses, and those courses help grow those ideas further.