INITIAL FINDINGS: URBAN AND SUBURBAN CLASSROOMS

During the pilot study, we learned that major technical changes had to be made in Kidspace . Indeed, the program which had worked perfectly well on our laboratory computers for small numbers of children, overwhelmed the classroom machines when used with whole classes of them. We reduced the graphics, eliminated the sounds, and generally reconfigured the program, but Kidspace still occasionally crashed, usually when students were working in the Y-Dimension . That space was accordingly dropped from subsequent versions of the program.

Although these technical difficulties, in a very real sense, limited findings from the pilot study, we were still able to learn a great deal. Such findings can be grouped into three categories -- patterns of actual classroom usage, the relationship between classroom contexts and effective use, and students' development of literary understandings.

Patterns of Use

Students in all four classrooms were uniformly motivated by Kidspace. This is evident in teachers' logs, observations, and students' statements in the post-pilot interviews. Students looked forward to having their turn at the system, and, in most cases, worked diligently within the application during their time on the computer. Their engagement with the program can be seen on the videotapes. When observed and interviewed about their experiences with Kidspace , participating students unanimously praised the software. The most typical response was that it was "fun." When asked about the value of Kidspace for their students' reading and writing, teachers were also uniformly enthusiastic. Teachers in the traditional classrooms, however, also expressed a desire for the software to "do more," e.g., have spell and grammar checkers and a printing capability so their students' work might be more polished and portable.

Students in both schools uniformly spent the majority of their on-line time writing stories in the Cricket Village space. In addition to developing plot and character through extended stories for the woodland creatures depicted on the screen, they filled in dialog bubbles with story-appropriate conversations. Students, for the most part, then, used the space as designed -- to explore plot development, setting, characterization, and dialog. Students in the Montessori classrooms also used the Communications space to comment on each other's work.

The second favorite space among students in both schools was the Y-Dimension , where they cut, pasted, and arranged the cartoon characters, and assigned plot and dialog to them. In short, students generally used the space as intended -- to constructively explore dialog, character, and plot development -- and a good percentage of them also explored and commented on each other's creations. Because they also tended, however, to crash the computer in the Y-Dimension , most student work therein was lost, and students increasingly avoided it.

Less popular with most students was the Exploratory Mission , where students wrote poetry and stories and selected pictures to enhance what they wrote. This was envisioned as a good space for students to undertake extended writing activities, especially writing about their reading experiences and/or other classroom activities involving literature. They did not do so on their own. We believe this was in part because the Exploratory Mission space offers less visual guidance than the other two spaces and in part because they were given little guidance from their teachers to do so.

Montessori students used the Communications Space to invite each other to read their work and exchange comments about it. Although there was no extended discourse among these students about specific writings, the students made good use of the area and seemed to enjoy commenting on each other's spaces. Montessori students did not use the Captain's Log for any purposes.

Students in the traditional classrooms used Communications as a place to exchange personal information unrelated to their Kidspace work. Thus, although these students were more likely to produce extended discourse, it was not about each other's, or indeed any, writing. These same students, under their teachers' direction, used the Captain's Log as a composition space for writing stories (in much the way the Exploratory Mission was intended). The teachers' purpose seems to have been to encourage more student writing, but, because the Captain's Log is a private space, this closed off discourse around that writing. I may be that these teachers conceptualized writing as a private act. Such usage does suggest, however, that students respond well to teacher direction in the use of the spaces.

In general, then, students tended to use Kidspace , especially its Cricket Village space, as we envisioned. The cartoon-like formats of this area seemed well chosen to evoke student exploration of literary elements in a constructive fashion, and many students enjoyed visiting each other's spaces and commenting on each other's work. In addition, some areas of usage that were disappointing, for example, extended discourse in the Communications space, might reasonably have been expected to develop given a longer and less challenging pilot period.

On the other hand, teachers in all the participating classrooms did not use Kidspace as intended. They did not use it to communicate with students, nor did they make any attempts to integrate its usage into regular classroom reading and/or literature activities. In some cases, they actually directed students to use the program in ways we considered counterproductive. It seems very likely, then, that extensive teacher training will be necessary for this or any similar program to be used to its full potential, even in classrooms where the approach to literature teaching and learning is generally response-based.


Classroom Contexts

While all four participating teachers had had some training and experience in computer use and prior experience having students use computers in their classrooms, their perceptions of the Kidspace activities differed in terms of how those activities were understood and instantiated. Such perceptions, in turn, appeared to be related to variations in the epistemological beliefs and attitudes inherent in the differing cultures of the schools in which the pilot study took place.

Teachers in the traditional classrooms seemed to view the computer as an instrument of instruction, much like a workbook or a traditional text. What students did in Kidspace was perceived more as a result of the software than of the individual child's thinking. This was evidenced in teachers' logs which consistently cast Kidspace and the machine as "doing" or "not doing" something for the children's writing, and in the ways in which they assessed its usefulness. In the traditional classrooms, there was also concern that students working on the computer not get distracted by surrounding classroom activity, and vice versa, and so an effort was made to keep other students away from those involved with Kidspace . Students in these classrooms accordingly were less likely to explore each other's worlds. Rather than using the Communications space to comment on each others' work, they used it to communicate thoughts about the school life and life in general.

In contrast, in the Montessori classrooms, Kidspace was perceived as one kind of material among many which students could manipulate as a concrete aid in constructing their own understandings of the literary experience. Montessori teachers encouraged classroom discussion of the program, exploring with their students their responses to it in terms of their work, rather than as an end in itself. Teachers and students in the Montessori classes also seemed more accustomed to the notion of public writing and response. Children in these classes frequently called their teachers and other students over to the machine to show and read their work to them, and students not working on the computers often stopped as they passed by to see what students working on them were doing. The Montessori students were also more likely to explore each others' efforts on the machine, and consistently took advantage of the Communications space to write comments about them.

Another cultural difference in the use of Kidspace in traditional and Montessori classrooms involved collaboration. Students in the Montessori classes were almost always paired for work within the program, and, in the majority of cases we observed, worked collaboratively within it. They talked about their writing and shared in its construction regardless of whose world they happened to be in. Montessori pairs also discussed their responses to other students' work and formulated collaborative comments about it. In contrast, students in the traditional classes were scheduled for individual time as often as they were paired. Even when paired, these students tended to split their time at the computer into individual turns. We observed several instances in these classes in which the pair member not using Kidspace was totally disengaged, obviously more interested in what was going on in the larger classroom than in what his or her partner was doing on the computer.

All in all, the learning culture shared by teachers and students in Montessori classrooms seemed more supportive of the use of Kidspace as intended than the culture of the traditional classrooms. Interestingly, however, teacher perceptions concerning the role of computers in classrooms had one striking similarity across schools. In all classrooms, work on the computer was consistently cast as separate from other classroom activities, and not incorporated and valued as part of a larger reading and writing program. While this surely was at least partially an affect of the experimental nature of the pilot study, it seems also to have resulted from a common belief that computer-based learning is somehow self-contained. This is perhaps the greatest stumbling block for teaching professionals and one that must be addressed before applications like Kidspace can be used to their full advantage.

Literary Understanding

Kidspace was designed to support students' development of literary understanding. As such, it was designed to be integrated into regular classroom activities involving the response-based teaching and learning of literature. In particular, it was hoped that students would use the Exploratory Mission space to develop impressions of the works they read both in and outside of class, and the Communications space to carry on an extended conversation about these and other writings. In the pilot study, these areas were not so used, making it difficult, if not impossible, to reach any conclusions concerning the utility of the program for supporting such development.

Nonetheless, there is some reason to believe the Communications space could support extended conversations about literature, in that students did use it conversationally:

In approximately 9.2 hours my life will be over. Felt out. Log off.
P.S. The all city concert is in 9.2 hours. Sean

Good luck, Sean. We will see you at the concert.
Megan and Alex

to comment on the program:
This new Kidspace is so cool. I'm the first one to use it. So far I've been into Captain's Log and Communications. I'm going to check out the rest.

The computer is cool. We are having lots of fun with it.

and, occasionally, to write comments on other students' work:

Ben, we like the story you wrote in Cricket Village. It's scary.

We like the story Angela and James wrote in the Y-Dimension. It's funny.
Look for our story in Cricket Village.

It seems reasonable to assume that given the right kind of encouragement from teachers and enough time, they could use it to develop extended conversations, not only about each others' writings within the program, but about what they read both in and outside of class.

Another good indication that Kidspace could support the development of literary understanding can be found in the very positive ways the writing spaces, especially Cricket Village , were used. The rich illustrations in Cricket Village seemed to inspire students to produce equally rich and coherent writings:

Once upon a time there was a snail named Bob. One day Bob was going for a walk when he saw an apple in a curly leaf. He decided to eat the apple when he saw something blue behind a giant mushroom. He went to go see what it was. What he saw there was the cutest snail he ever did see. He went over but the snail got scared. It tried to run away but you know how fast snails are.

It was night time now. I had just gone to bed when a beautiful sound made me run to the window. On top of my house was a little cricket blowing on a flute. His flute had a soft sound. It was just loud enough that I could hear it. If it was any louder, it would wake up our neighbors.


Compare these with the writing students in traditional classes produced in the Captain's Log (without reference to illustrations):

Once upon a time there was a little girl and her name was Michelle. Her mom asked her to go out and find a house. She came upon a house and there was a lady outside. She said, "Hello, can I borrow some flour so my mom can make some cookies?" Then the lady went inside and said come in and she got me some flour and I said, "Thank you." Then she went outside and went to her house.

Once there was a girl
Who was as pretty as a pearl.
Her hair was all brown,
Which looked beautiful with a crown.
She lived in a castle,
Which was no regular one.
It had stables in the living room
And a mall in the kitchen.

These writing samples suggest that the Cricket Village scenes helped students to focus on details of setting and character in developing well constructed plots. Some students also seemed to use the pictures in the Exploratory Mission as inspiration for extended writing:

There's fire in the sky if you look up you can see the celebration of whatever you feel like celebrating. It feels good inside and all your troubles fall behind. When the noises start, at first you're scared but by the end you could care less about the noises in the sky cause the color's the wonderful thing.

The Fish and the Shark
Once there was a shark and a fish and they wanted to have a race. The fish said, "I bet you all the treasure in the sea." The shark said "Go," and the shark gobbled the poor fish up and he won the race

Others did not:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
I'm writing poetry
And you should be too.

No students, however, used the space as intended to develop extended commentary on their reading. This is clearly a usage that requires teacher prompting and quite possibly valuing (some sort of grading, perhaps). Future investigations should focus on this issue.

---