How Are 21st Century Skills Captured in Makerspaces?
Dhyan Adler-Beléndez, Eduardo Hoppenstedt, Mishaal Husain, Edwin Chng, Bertrand Schneider · 2020
A growing body of educational literature defends the need to prepare students for the new demands of the 21st century. Four skills are frequently cited among the most important skills that students should master: collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity (4Cs). Digital fabrication spaces, also known as makerspaces, promise to facilitate the development of these skills through project-based learning and open access to a range of prototyping tools, such as laser cutting and 3D printing. Despite this promise, there is little agreement in the educational literature on how makerspaces are contributing to the development of 21st century skills. In this review, we examined the types of student data that are being collected in makerspaces and analyzed how this data supports the development of 21st century skills in digital fabrication environments. We found that 1) the motivation for the majority of studies (46%) was to evaluate the space (with a focus on best practices and challenges of maintaining these spaces), while very few studies (3%) leveraged measurements for learners' social benefits (e.g., diversity and inclusion, gender-equality); 2) 53% of the studies focused on a 21st century skill, with a stronger focus on collaboration and communication; 3) 92% of the reviewed papers relied on traditional methods (e.g., surveys) to capture student data, and only 8% explored complex tracking technologies such as sensing devices; 4) finally, less than 10% of the studies used pre-post measures, which is a prerequisite for measuring learners' growth. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings in measuring 21st century skills in makerspaces.