“Documentation is now so ingrained in me”: how students interpret and value documentation in creative learning domains

Within creative domains in studio- and project-based education, documentation is often central to demonstrating outcomes, process, and progress. Despite much prior work into the instructional practices, technologies, and tools that support cultivating documentation practices, no prior work explores the student valuing and perception of documentation. To address this, we deploy a design probe to elicit and externalize conceptions of documentation with the same cohort of students in two semesters. Eleven participants engaged in higher education undergraduate programs completed the study. We focus our analysis on one activity — listing and ranking documentation’s perceived values. Through our analysis, we developed and validated a robust codebook for students’ values. We demonstrate the values of documentation to be coherent across background, time, and experience of the student participants. We also share insights on nine main roles documentation plays for students and discuss how documentation plays not only an important role in communicating creative work to diverse stakeholders but in building self-confidence, motivation, and affect for project-based and hands-on exploration.