2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Makerspaces are increasingly more important in engineering education because they enable learner-guided experiences related to the process of creating. Many previous studies have investigated the nature of the learning that happens in makerspaces when students engage in the creative process, with factors such as makerspace culture, knowledge, and skills being examined. Currently, though, there are no instruments with evidence of validity and reliability for measuring the learning that happens within makerspaces. Therefore, in this project, we are aiming to create an instrument that can be used within diverse engineering education settings to help institutions assess the impact of makerspaces on their users. In previous NSF-funded projects, part of our team has been able to develop an intimate understanding of academic makerspaces through ethnographic methodologies: who uses the spaces; how they operate; what users are learning; how users are learning. In order to move from qualitative findings into a quantitative instrument, we proposed this four-stage project along with experts in instrument development. The first stage is for developing construct definitions, where we determine what we want our instrument to measure by contrasting our team’s expertise on makerspaces with the existing literature to create theory-informed definitions. From these definitions, we move onto the second stage, where we use those definitions to generate draft items to be used in the survey instrument. Those draft items then go through a review process with experts in both makerspaces and instrument design. Additionally, we recruit students in our target population to participate in think-aloud interviews: interviews where the students go through the instrument and talk out loud about their interpretation and thought process when answering the questions. The interviews allow us to assess if our target population is interpreting the items how we intended. The third stage is to design and conduct validation studies that will allow us to test our hypothesized factor structure and check for evidence of reliability of the instrument. Finally, the fourth stage consists of finalizing the instrument and conducting additional validation studies that examine how our instrument scores are related to fairness. In the end, the goal is to have an instrument that can be used in diverse engineering makerspace settings. At the present moment, we are in the second stage of our project, and we anticipate we will be on the third stage by the time of the conference.