PILOT STUDY
The Beats
, then, was specifically designed to focus on the features previously identified as
supportive of response-based teaching and learning. Our goal in pilot testing the
program was similarly focused on the capacity of such features to elicit and support
student responses (Meskill & Swan, in press b).
Students and Procedures
A class of twenty-six undergraduates enrolled in a creative writing course at a community
college in upstate New York participated in the initial piloting of the Beats
. The class was selected because of the availability at that institution of appropriately
equipped computers, the applicability of the Beats
to the course syllabus, and the pedagogical orientation and willingness of its instructor.
Students in the class, who were not aware of its computer-related aspects when they
registered for it, ranged in age from 18 to 38, and in computer experience from novice to expert. They consisted of approximately equal numbers of men and women,
about one-third of whom belonged to ethnic minorities, and were generally representative
of students found in similar classes at the community college level.
The instructor, himself a practicing poet, generally adopted response-based approaches
in conducting his classes. Believing that students' responses to literature need
to be valued and made central to classroom processes, he worked to model effective
modes of literary discourse, to facilitate and support student participation in it, and
to weave student responses into a coherent, on-task stream. Typical classroom discussions
focused on the forms and functions of poetry, historical contexts, and students' aesthetic and critical responses to texts. The resulting classroom dynamic was one
of instructor-led exploration, with a tacit invitation to students to contribute
their thoughts and ideas. With twenty-six students, however, opportunities to join
whole class discussions were limited. Indeed, three more vocal students typically dominated
classroom discussion.
The pilot study took place over the course of five regularly scheduled class periods.
In the first session, the instructor oriented the whole class to the Beats
, and split it into two sections so that students, who were paired for the orientation,
could work individually with the program during the remainder of the pilot period.
During the next four classes, students in both groups alternated between such individual work with the program and whole class discussions of the materials it covered
in their regular classroom setting. Students thus used the Beats
for two 50-minute class periods split and followed by a whole class discussion period.
As the computer lab in
which the study took place was not accessible to them outside of class time, each
student had equal time in which to complete their on-line assignments. These were
similar to off-line assignments given previously during the semester -- read selected
works, think about the techniques used, and come to class prepared to discuss those thoughts.
The only change from normal procedure was that students' thoughts were to be recorded
and shared with the class via the computer.
For the first of these on-line sessions, students were asked to read two poems at
home and record their response to them on the discourse pages associated with them
in the Beats
. They were also encouraged to respond therein to each others' comments. Student
responses were printed, copied and distributed to the whole class. These printouts
served as the basis for the whole class discussion that took place between the computer-based classes. During the second set of on-line sessions, students were asked to compose
original poems in the style of the Beat poets and to enter these in Notes
in the margins of the poems they imitated. Students then rotated computers to read
and comment on each others' compositions. Poems and comments so produced were again
printed, copied and distributed to students, who discussed them during the final,
whole class, period of the unit.
Data Collection and Analysis
The pilot study was designed to test the viability of the response-based tools and
hypermedia environment of the Beats
. To these ends, each on-line and corresponding off-line class was observed by a
graduate student participating in the project. The project directors were also present
for the initial orientation. In addition, all participating students and the instructor were interviewed at the close of the study, and questionnaires concerning their
reactions to the entire process were completed by seventeen of the twenty-six participating
students. The data so collected were collated, analyzed, and are presented in the following section according to the ways in which we envisioned the Beats
supporting student discourse -- by making reticent students' voices heard, by encouraging
more reflective discourse, by freeing such discourse from time constraints, by providing
concrete representations of conversations, and by providing concrete representations of links to text.
