Youth Attitudes Towards Assessment Tools in After-school Informal Learning and Employment Training Programs (RTP)

摘要

"Making" is an umbrella term that refers to a wide range of activities including tinkering, customizing, designing, and fabricating small-batch artifacts that usually require technical skills in self-directed projects. After-school programs focused on making introduce youth to engineering concepts and skills before college and provide opportunities to engage in hands-on projects that require creative problem solving, teamwork, and persistence. Additionally, these programs have been shown to strengthen job-readiness and can lead to careers in technical fields. Given the diversity of the contexts in which these programs are being offered and the range of projects, technologies, and approaches that they utilize, there is a need to understand the potential of existing and new assessment tools that can provide insight into their impact on youth participants. Additionally, as interest in after-school programs grow, and they expand to include hundreds of youth participants, it is important to identify appropriate assessment tools that can be deployed at scale and provide useful insights into programs' impact to educators. A promising approach to evaluating the quality of these programs is conducting assessments that capture program impact both in terms of technical skills, such as the ability to program or 3D model a desired object, and non-cognitive skills which are defined as "attitudes, behaviors and strategies that facilitate success in school or workplace". In this context, a key factor that impacts the acceptance and relevance of assessment tools is youths' attitudes towards them. For quantitative assessment tools, youth attitudes can impact the tool's face validity, the degree to which an assessment tool appears subjectively to participants as measuring what it aims to measure.