Publishing Web for Students' Final Papers
Publishing Web for Students' Final Papers |
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From: May Sarmac
Email: nutshell@cats.ucsc.edu
Course: Psychology 101: Informal Learning and Technology
College: University of California, Santa Cruz
Instructor: Eugene Matusov, Ph.D
ClassWeb: http://www.ematusov.com/psych101
ChildrenObservations: Yes
Date: 13 Dec 1996
Time: 13:51:02
Remote Name: mingong-mac-16.ucsc.edu
The purpose of this paper is to examine what sorts of learning took place within children during their participation in the University of California Links Project. This Project took place at a local, Latino based community center in downtown Santa Cruz, California. At this community center, undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz assisted the children with personal computers and with computer and board games. Throughout this program, children learned cognitive and social skills from their interactions with others. These skills are mainly taught in traditional, formal settings, but can also be taught and enhanced in informal settings.
Children, between the age of 7 to 12, learn about computers through interaction and informal teaching at a Latino based community center in downtown Santa Cruz, California. The question of whether or not children can learn best through this method remains. This program at the community center is part of the University of California Links Program, where undergraduates from the university go to the local community and establish a fellowship with the various members of that local community. The objective of the U.C.. Links Program in Santa Cruz is to establish a bond between the children of the local community and the undergraduates. Through 'hands on' experience, these children learn various tasks, skills and activities that can be done on computers.
In interactive learning, materials seen, heard, or used by the child are modified on the basis of input from the child (Strommen & Revelle, 1990). In other words, in interactive learning, a child is presented with different information or options as a result of responding one way rather than another. Children have the opportunity to interpret the information in different ways and learn from their interpretation. Interactive learning is often also called informal learning. Informal learning is child-initiated. There is freedom in movement and talk, there is a vast amount of subjective materials and play is encouraged for productive learning and self instruction.
Informal or interactive learning usually takes place outside of school settings. After school clubs and programs are good sources for informal learning. They allow children to work with each other to educate themselves and find questions to their own problems. In an article by Allen (1992), an after school club designed for non-school learning was described. In this club, children volunteer to be there. They selected topics they would like to learn more about and wrote compositions about that topic. In order to write these compositions, the children had to use different resource materials as a means of gathering information Interestingly, the children not only gathered information from literature sources, but they also went out to their local communities to gather the information they needed. The children also provided feedback on each other's compositions. They used this feedback as constructive criticism, allowing them to revise their papers and sometimes giving others ideas for expanding their topics. Some children realized their topics were similar, so they worked together to write one composition on their topics. Through this project, the children motivated themselves and each other to learn more about topics of their interest. They not only did they learn more about their topics, but they also learned how to turn their communities into a resource.
Formal learning traditionally takes place in the classroom. In this environment, lectures are well planned, questions and recitations are used to achieve a specific learning objective (Lehane and Goldman, 1976). There is one area of study that is focused on at a time. There is little or no interaction between the students or between the students and the teacher. Students in the classroom setting are passive learners, where information is taught to them. In a formal classroom setting, the teacher often teaches in one style, ignoring other styles that may be effective for the children's learning. The teacher fails to adapt his/her teaching style to one that adapts to the learning style of his/her students. In this setting, the teacher evaluates a students work, but this evaluation is more of a critique of the work rather than an evaluation to help improve the student's knowledge on that task or assignment.
The purpose of this paper is to not only examine which method of teaching is more effective for children, but also to examine what teaching method is more effective for teachers. This paper will also examine what children learn in an informal and formal setting. By having an understanding of what is learned and taught in formal and informal settings, contents of learning and teaching can be modified to fit the needs of both the teacher and the student.
Method
Participants There were about thirty children that participated in this program. This group of children consisted of both males and females. The school grades of these children ranged from grade one to grade six. The ethnicity of these children were mostly of Latino decent whose families were in the lower economic class. The twelve undergraduates that participated in this program had different ethnicities and came from middle to higher middle economic classes. The group of undergraduates also consisted of both males and females.
Materials Personal computers, CD ROM games such as: the "Lion King", "Magic School Bus", "Reader Rabbit 1 and 2" and "Treasure Mountain", and board games such as: "Monopoly", "Sorry", "Connect Four", and "Mancala" were used as tools for interacting with the children.
Procedure The undergraduates and children attended the program two days a week for eight weeks. I, an undergraduate who participated in the U.C. Links Program, attended the program on Wednesdays from 2:15 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Thursdays from 3:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. After each visit to the site, the undergraduates had to write field notes of our observations and interactions.
Discussion
During the times I interacted with and observed the children in this program, I noticed that they did learn from their interactions with each other and with the undergraduates. They not only learned to become familiar with the computers, for example, moving the mouse and clicking on an icon or loading a CD ROM game into the CD ROM drive, but they also learn the same skills they learn in a classroom, only the children may not realize it. In a classroom, children are tested for the skills they learn, but in an informal setting, learning can be noted when a child wins at a game. For example, in the memory block game in the "Lion King" CD ROM, players match pictures together by turning over stones. One undergraduate observed,
"the game...was teaching memorization skills without drilling. Francisco1 saw the point of the game as winning...I don't think he was aware that he was improving his memorization" A.M., 11-18-96).
Sources and materials for learning are disguised as games for children. They see the CD ROM games, like "Lion King", as games, but as one undergraduate wrote in her field notes,
"Francisco was early to the community center and was able to pick out Lion King as his source of learning today"(S.W., 11/3/96). The children play games because it is fun for them; the educational value of games are sometimes over looked. As I observed in one of my field notes, "I think board games are really great. It gives the kids a chance to explore different things to learn, whether it's counting or reading or following instructions, the kids still learn a lot of different things" (M.S., 10/19/96).
While interacting with the children and playing various games with them, I noticed that playing board games, such as Monopoly, enhances the children's cognitive skills. Some children learn numbers through counting dice, counting how many spaces they have to move and counting play money. They also enhance their reading skills by reading 'Community Chest' and 'Chance' cards and by reading the name of the space they landed on.
While the children interact with each other and with the undergraduates, they also learn social skills. They learn how to work in a group and make new friends. During of the visits to the community center, one undergraduate wrote,
"Everyone seemed more comfortable working in a group. We weren't necessarily working together, but we were working at the same time so we could share our projects" (D.S., 11-21-96).
Friendships develop through collaborating with each other to solve or figure out games. At the beginning of the program, I would ask some of the children, who were playing games on the computer, if another child can sit next to and play the game with them. At first, the children were shy with each other, but as time progressed, the children became acquainted with each other and invited each other to play with them.
The children who participated in the U.C.. Links Project were able to learn several skills through interaction with others. Though they may not have been aware of the skills they learned because their learning was in the form of playing games, they learned several tasks at once. In a formal classroom, that may not have been possible. However, I believe that one type of learning environment is not as beneficial without the other. What is taught in one setting can be applied and enhanced in the other. Material that is learned and taught in a formal classroom setting may be difficult to comprehend or the relevance of it may be ambiguous, but it can be clarified when the material is applied in an informal environment. Having only an informal or formal learning/teaching setting can only be beneficial to either a learner or a teacher, but not both at the same time. There are certain things that cannot be learned or taught in an informal setting, unless it is taught in a formal classroom first. For example, areas in the natural sciences, such as plant pollination and the inheritance of genes, may not be interesting for children if it was presented to them in an informal setting, therefore they may not choose to learn about it. If this material was first taught to them in a formal classroom, they may find it interesting and may want to conduct their own experiments in an informal environment understand its process. By teaching children information in a traditional classroom, then applying their knowledge in an informal setting, learning can be more meaningful for them. Teachers also benefit in that they acquire new styles and methods of education.
References
Allen, C.L. (1992). Multimedia learning environments designed with organizing principles from non-school settings. In E. DeCorte, M.C. Linn, H. Mandl, & L. Verschaffel (Eds.), Computer-Based Learning Environments and Problem Solving. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Lehane, S. & Goldman, R. (1976). An adaptive model for individualizing young children’s learning in school and at home. Elementary School Journal, 76(6): 373-380.
Nganwa-Bagumah, M. & Mwamenda, T.S. (1991). Effects on reading comprehension tests of matching and mismatching students’ design preferences. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 72(3): 947-951.
Strommen, E.F. & revelle, G.L. (1990). Research in Interactive Technologies at the children’s television workshop. Educational Technology Research and Development, 38(4): 65-80.
Evans, M.A. (1979). A comparative study of young children’s classroom activities and learning outcomes. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 49: 15-26.
Students of Psychology 101. (1996). Class Web: Psychology 101 [On-line]. Available: http://www.ematusov.com/psych101.
Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory. (1996). Introduction [On-line]. Available: http://www.mcrel.org/hpc/informal/intro.html.
Educational Technology Center, Department of Information and Computer Sciences. Formal and Informal [On-line]. Available: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~archive/documentation/learn-sci-reasoning/subsection 3.42 html
Clemson University. (1996). Should We Use cooperative Learning in College Chemistry? [On-line]. Available: http://tigerched.clemson.edu/cooplearn/paper.html
