Learning to create and creating to learn

What 21st century skills are nurtured through design projects and how can we assess these? How do design projects support students' identities as creators and critiquers of new media? We are conducting a longitudinal study to follow a cohort of students from sixth through eighth grade who attend an inner-city charter school with an in-school and after-school program focus on new media literacies and programs. We are working closely with the program design team and the participating mentors and teachers to create a multi-dimensional picture of the students and their work. Data collection including surveys, interviews with students, staff, and family, and student artifact collection.

In addition to the work across the cohort, we are developing in-depth case studies of twelve learners from this cohort that will take the form of technobiographies. Narrative summaries and visualizations of learning activities across setting and time are being developed to help us theorize about the conditions that support the diversification of children’s learning ecologies over time. They includes documentation of the people, tools, and informational resources that supported each activity.

View Researchers study how technology shapes the ways in which students learn, an online 2006 article on the Stanford News Service.

This work is funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation: Buidling the Field of Digital Media and Learning.

Computer clubhouses as learning ecologies for fluency development

What drives the generation of self-defined projects in computer clubhouses and how does learning occur within them? A learning ecologies framework is used to understand the role the clubhouse plays in the member’s broader life learning space of home, school, peers, and distributed learning resources and to design interventions that might spark cross context learning.

In this research the development of technological fluency is studied in the context of a community-based computer clubhouse that provides 10-18 year-olds with high end computing tools and software but does not provide formal instruction. Ten case studies of individual members will be developed using I1) participant interviews on learning at the clubhouse and technology use at home and school, and (2) participant-observation as the primary research methods.

We will also experiment with “seeding studies” where we provide material resources for learning a specific new capability within a software program and study how members learn from them and will experiment with creating opportunities for members to share their work with parents and others in public events.

Fluency development in peer and home contexts

What is the nature of high school students’ involvement in technological activities outside of school? We study the factors that drive youth who participate in technological fluency building activities, their use of learning resources, the meaning the activity holds for them, and whether the activity leads to pursuit of formal education.

Through semi-structured interviews, this study will investigate these kinds of informal learning processes that involve learning to innovate and are driven by personal goals and as such are “high agency” learning contexts. The goal of the research is to identify social processes, learning strategies, resource use, and the emergence of learning goals within informal activity.

Through survey and interview data, we have identified a set of eight students, balanced with respect to gender, who have engaged in sustained activities that are likely to build technological fluency. Additional interviews are used to chart adolescents’ learning ecologies with peers and at home. The first interview will use a pre-existing learning ecologies interview developed by the lead researcher. In the second interview, participants will be invited to share their design work and speak about how their learning proceeded and the kinds of resources they used. Focal participants will be asked to nominate any same-school learning partners or parents who are learning partners for an interview.

Advancing tech-fluency of underrepresented youth and their teachers through PBL

This five-year research project is designed to contribute to a basic understanding of how aspects of technological fluency develop in both formal and informal settings.

In the first phase of the research, the studies will define profiles of student fluency and examine how these profiles are associated with learning ecologies constituted by the interweaving contexts of classrooms as well as informal learning communities situated at home, with peers, and in neighborhood institutions. We will investigate students’ access, interest, and experiences with new technologies—with an emphasis on identifying barriers to equity as well as revealing learning resources. Survey and focus group studies will document how creative learning opportunities are distributed across different communities and how they contribute to interests.

The second phase of the work will use what we have learned to design courses and course units appropriate for middle school and high school students in both formal and informal settings, and will be carried out collaboratively with teachers, researcher-designers, and students. A core guiding principle of these courses will be a primary focus on the student as designer, and a learning goal will be to help students understand design as a human process in which everyone can be involved.

In the third phase of work, we will test the conjecture that with appropriate support for productive interactions, design activities can minimize barriers to equity that have been identified in the literature and open up developmental pathways for students’ future learning. By explicitly uncoupling the common confounds between demographics and experiences, we will investigate conditions that yield equity in technological fluencies. The teaching and learning processes in these courses will be studied systematically, with a particular focus on collaborative design work.

Formative assessment of ThinkQuest program

In the fall of 2005, the Oracle Education Foundation made a gift to sponsor the ThinkQuest program at a local high school. ThinkQuest is an international website design competition in which students from around the world collaborate to build sites for other youth about an educational topic. Barron, Martin, and Lewis from the youthLAB team are involved in a two-year formative assessment of the program implementation.

We expect that students who participate in the ThinkQuest program will have access to new opportunities and experiences. We will look at student experience in the program across four areas: (1) Participation, (2) Learning of design processes and technical skills, (3) Collaboration, and (4) Global perspectives.

It is also possible that the implementation of the ThinkQuest program will have an influence outside of the specific Multimedia classroom at the high school. The evaluation will look at general implementation of the program in the school setting and look at if and how it has had and impact on the school.

Bermuda computing curriculum project

The Bermuda Computing Curriculum project is a collaborative effort by the Computer Science Department and the School of Education at Stanford University to develop a computing curriculum for Bermuda public schools that uses programming as a central theme. Professor Eric Roberts from the Computer Science department is the co-PI on the project. The work is part of the Bermuda Technology Education Collaboration (B.TEC) and is sponsored by the International Education Collaboration Foundation (IECF).

Since the project beginning in 1998 we have conducted research in the schools with students and teachers to find out more about the impact of the courses on student learning, experiences, opportunity, and future ideas. To get a richer picture of the students’ actual future paths after graduation we will look at a small subset of students. Interviews will be carried out with students who were surveyed and interviewed in May 2003. The goal of this work is to document the long-term benefits of the curriculum for student’s future learning and career trajectories. Students who took several of the computing courses during their high school careers and who were interviewed in May of 2003 will be followed. This ongoing documentation will help establish the value of the courses and perhaps help identify ways that former students could be assisted in their career development. Attempts will be made to interview parents and employers as well as the students themselves.

Toward a global perspective on world history at the high school level

This project is led by Professor Sam Wineburg. The teaching of history takes place in a national context that frames historical events and grinds the interpretive lenses used to study them. Topics taught in the World history curriculum - the "Scramble for Africa," "The Industrial Revolution," "World War II" - are, perforce, reflected through the prism of each nation's unique history.  This project will create a web-based collaboration between students in Sweden and the United States that aims to overcome the limitations of a single national lens. Our goal is to help high school students in two countries understand how the same event - we will begin with the Second World War - can be viewed and understood from vastly different vantage points. Comparing what they learn to peers in another country will lead students, to greater historical understanding, a deeper sense of the perspectival and tentative nature of historical knowing, and a firmer commitment to global citizenship.

At the core of innovation will be tools and approaches that draw on ICT. Digital technologies have transformed historical research, allowing anyone with a desktop computer and an Internet connection to enter an archive and study original documents. At the same time, high school history instruction looks like it did thirty or fifty years ago - revolving around a static textbook narrative and reflecting the viewpoints of the nation-state. We will use digital archives and web-based learning environments to expose young people to the raw materials of history - original documents - that resist single all-encompassing interpretations. Using insights from the learning sciences, we will build a web-based interface for studying history from a comparative perspective and investigate student learning using both quantitative and qualitative methods.