THE
STANTON/HEISKELL CENTER FOR PUBLIC POLICY IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS
AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS, THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK GRADUATE
SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER
Founded
at the City University of New York Graduate School in 1988, the
Stanton/Heiskell Center for Public Policy in Telecommunications
and Information Systems studies the social and economic impact of
telecommunications, particularly as these relate to the need for
increased and equitable access among low-income and disadvantaged
communities. Project TELL is a partnership between Bell
Atlantic, the New York City Board of Education and the City
University of New York.
Helen
Birenbaum Director,
The Stanton/Heiskell Center
Project Director, Project TELL
William Kornblum
Faculty Chair, The Stanton/Heiskell Center
Principal Investigator, Project TELL
Professor of Sociology, Graduate School
Research Assistants, Project TELL
Leeli Davidson, Jaime Davila, Amy Hughes
Ruben Lusinyants, Jean Phelps, Avare
Stewart
January
1998
33 West 42nd
Street, New York, NY 10036
PROJECT TELL (TELECOMMUNICATIONS
FOR LEARNING)
Background
For
seven years (1990-1997) the Stanton/Heiskell Center studied the
educational gains underserved inner-city children can make when
given access to computers in their home. Project TELL is
one of the first demonstrations of after-school home use of
networked computers to encourage learning among disadvantaged
students and their families.
The
project was created in response to the growing information gap
between low-income families and communities and their more
affluent counterparts, who have far greater access to
telecommunication technologies.
Bell Atlantic recognized this disparity and formed a partnership
with the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School and
the NYC Board of Education (BOE) to provide technical resources
and financial support. The partnership is an example of how
three institutions successfully pooled the talent and resources
necessary to support a major socially strategic and complex
program of research.
The goal of Project TELL was to determine if students reading at the 25-50% level in fifth grade could improve their school performance and succeed in gaining admission to college. We hypothesized that a significant proportion of underachieving students could reverse educational failure through home access to computers and telecommunication networks, supported by educational back-up systems. Our emphasis was primarily on the computer as an aid to the education process and only secondarily as a skill for employment.
The
results were encouraging: 46% graduated from high school in four
years, as compared to the system-wide (BOE) average of 49%, which
includes high achieving students. What is more significant,
the systems graduation rate for minority students, 41%, is 5%
percent lower than that for the participating TELL students, all
of whom are minority students.
The project was initially funded for three years,
commencing with middle school (grades 6-8). We found that time
spent on task of reading and writing in computer-based
telecommunications environment could be correlated with
individual gains in motivation and school performance. The
results of the first three years were so positive that Bell
Atlantic continued support for four more years. The challenge of
the high school phase of the project, grades 9-12, required
academic tutoring on-line (and off-line) to help students raise
their achievement levels to meet college admission standards.
Bell Atlantic was the primary funder of the project; the Center
received supplemental grants from corporate and private
foundations for specific initiatives, e.g. peer tutoring. The
project cost was approximately $300,000 per year. Bell Atlantic
donated upgraded computers during the fourth year of the project.
Reduced costs for telecommunications hardware and services as
well as inventive leasing arrangements will significantly lower
the costs of future projects that support technology access to
low-income homes.
Clearly,
we found no quick “techno-fix” solutions to the
educational problems of the underserved. However, our major
findings acknowledge:
1.
Continual personal participation by concerned adult(s) through
direct contact and over the electronic network was essential to
the students’ progress.
2.
Home computers and Internet access, along with training in their
use, and continued adult and student interactions in an online
learning environment can “turn around” a significant
number of underachieving inner-city students, and encourage
learning and literacy among siblings and family members in the
home.
3.
Parental (and/or guardian) involvement can significantly
influence student achievement; cooperation with the school,
administrators and teachers can influence and enhance
student outcomes.
4.
Information technology can compete with TV and the lure of the
streets; even encouraging some students to seek refuge from
the streets.
5.
The lack of educational software for underachieving middle and
high school students is problematic. As the development of
educational software accelerates, moving away from “drill
and kill”, and becoming more interactive and diagnostically
sophisticated, it appears to be only a matter of time before
applications and programs on the Internet will have more
qualitative educational impact.
6.
The continual need to upgrade computers to keep up with the
developing sophisticated software places low-income families at a
disadvantage. Affordable access to the Internet, as well as
to the new software, must become more readily available.
In conclusion, we
recommend that (1) early family access to information technology
should be
encouraged, (2) research to address issues of technology’s
cost and software should continue and (3) online learning
opportunities should be incorporated in plans for educational
reform.
While
home use of computers has mushroomed, low-income communities
– homes and schools – have not kept pace, when
oftentimes access to a phone is problematic. With the
implementation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act legislation,--
commencing in 1998 -- schools and libraries will receive
discounts for communication services from 20-90%, based on need.
The intent is to readily bring telecommunications access to low-income
schools and libraries. However, lingering issues of teacher
preparation, content/curriculum development and technical
upgrading must be resolved if children from low-income
communities are to benefit.
Citing a recent study, Cybernation, The NY Times 11/18/97
reports that the field of information technology is the nation’s
largest industry, ahead of construction, food products, and
automotive manufacturing. Workers in the field earn wages
73% higher than the average wage (in the over all private sector),
and employment rose 7.2 percent to 4.26 million.
The
desirable jobs in our “new economy” require cognitive
and technical skills, making post-secondary education a minimal
prerequisite. Yet college graduation rates nationally for
minority students still lag far behind: 39% white, 36% Asian
Americans, 18.5% Black and 12% Hispanic. The project
TELL students who are in college will be followed, to determine
if their graduation rates will correspond to their high school
achievement and be measurably higher than the national average
for minority students.
With the call for national standards and the demand for higher
achievement rates, universities, school systems and
communities must explore new strategies to help underserved
students succeed. While the benefits of computer technology
should not be over-stated, Project TELL has demonstrated that
technology can be a critical resource in meeting the challenge.
The university can take a leadership role in this effort.
Urban Poverty and
Education
America’s
students increasingly have the characteristics of the
educationally disadvantaged (i.e., they are increasingly minority
and poor) and it is in the cities where disadvantaged students
are (and will be) concentrated. After defining the
educationally disadvantaged as those students who “have been
exposed to inappropriate educational experiences in at least one
of ...three educational domains”--formal schooling, family,
and community—(Natrelli 15) the proportion of children in
poverty in the United States is expected to increase from about
16% in 1979, 22% in 1983, to 27% in 2020 (Natrielli 16). Not
surprisingly, other indicators of educational disadvantage status
are expected to increase (most strikingly the number of children
living with mothers who have not completed high school) from 13.6
million in 1983 to 21.2 million in 2020 (Cummings and Koebel,
1992). Children’s success and mobility are influenced
by parents’ educational attainment.
Education
for minorities is generally inadequate, beginning in the
elementary schools and continuing through the high schools.
“Lack of optimal environmental stimulation in the early
childhood of lower-class children produces sequelae that are
manifest later in life (Cummings, 6). Actually, by the time
minority children have entered junior high school they are
already at a distinct disadvantage and cannot successfully
compete with their chronological adequately educated counterparts
from other schools. The scholastic scores of minority
students start to deviate from the norm beginning in elementary
school and the deviation downward from the norm widens with each
successive year.
“It is frequently argued that improving the education of the present generation of poor people will have large positive effects on future generations as educational values pass from parent to child. From this it is sometimes speculated that educational expenditures have the unique characteristic of solving the poverty problem once and for all; a successful educational experience for one generation means that future progeny will take naturally to education and very few will end up with skills so meager as to earn only poverty level incomes.” (Ribich, 101)
In proposing one solution to attacking urban poverty, the Stanton/Heiskell Center is suggesting that access to computers in the homes of disadvantaged students, in tandem with parental support, can improve children’s achievement rate.
Project
TELL: Closing the Information Gap: A Proposed Solution
Educators
and political leaders in the United States and Europe are
increasingly concerned about the widening "information gap"
between affluent families who have computers and access to the
Internet (at home and in schools) and poor families who have far
less access to these powerful technologies of the information age
(Castells 1996; Kantrowitz 1994). Project TELL explores the
question of what gains young people from disadvantaged
backgrounds actually do make when they gain access to computers
and information networks for use at home during their middle and
high school years. In addition to this most basic research
question, all the participants in Project TELL have had a wide
range of valuable experiences, as educators and students working
together to create an on-line learning community, separate from
their actual schools but inevitably linked to them as well.
Overall, the results of this research will demonstrate that
through home access to computers and telecommunications networks,
a significant proportion of underachieving students could make
immense strides and even reverse educational failure. But as in
all social research, this statement requires qualification and
further analysis. In particular, it is important to emphasize
over and again that home computers and telecommunications
technologies alone do not represent a magic bullet for
educational reform. Their successful use, as we will show,
depends unquestionably on the presence of educators and other
helping adults who can teach students (and teachers) how to use
the hardware and who will work with them to realize the
technology's potential to support learning experiences. If these
criteria are met, student participation online can effectively
lengthen the school day and offer learning resources previously
not available to the students or their families.
As a longitudinal study over seven years,
Project TELL is unique among the small number of demonstration
research studies on the issues of computer and network uses and
school achievement (Siefert, Gerbner and Fisher 1989; Winner 1997).
Our research is of particular relevance in the burgeoning
literature about computer assisted learning in that it traces the
effects of home computers with network access on the lives of
disadvantaged students and their families. We have been following
a group of New York City public school girls and boys (now young
men and women), from lower-income, predominantly minority
families in representative inner city neighborhoods. We began
working with the students in 1990 when they were in the sixth
grade and were enrolled in five New York City Middle Schools, one
in each borough. These schools are essentially average for the
inner city, each with a high proportion of students who score
below the mean on standardized reading and math tests. After
middle school the students were dispersed over more than fifty
different New York City high schools.
In the first
phase of Project TELL (1990 -1993), 125 girls and boys who had
scored between the fiftieth and twenty fifth percentiles on their
standardized reading tests in the fifth grade were invited to
become students in the project. This selection criteria was
suggested by the New York City Schools, for which it is a
definition of students who are "at risk" of later
failure and early school leaving after the middle school years.
Students in the treatment group were chosen at random from the
pool of eligible "at risk" students in five middle
schools located in each borough. The students were matched to a
comparison group with similar test scores who also attended the
same middle schools.
The Project TELL students
were given an IBM PS2 computer, color monitor, printer, stand,
modem and access to two networks, NYCENET, the New York City
Board of Education telecommunications network, and Project TELL
ONLINE, a private service. Both systems offered email, real-time
chat, games, educational resources, and access to a larger
network of youthful and adult subscribers. Only three or four of
the households had a home computer at the time of initial
selection, and these were not equipped with modems or internal
disk drives. When students and their families were informed of
the opportunity to join Project TELL they were most enthusiastic.
Only two or three refused the opportunity to participate, mainly
due to worries about protecting the equipment.
The TELL students attended a
weekly, two-hour computer user group in their schools after
regular school hours. After school user groups were run by two
teachers from each of the middle schools who were assisted by
members of the Project staff. The purpose of these weekly
sessions was to teach students how to use their computers, how to
get on line, and to ensure that students' equipment was in
running order. Students were required to attend these
sessions, although they were not eliminated from the study if
their attendance was spotty. They also understood that if they
finished the three years of middle school in good standing in the
Project, they would then own their home computer equipment.
Students in the comparison group did not receive any of these
treatments nor were they aware that they were in a study or a
statistical comparison group.
Each computer came with a standard
package of software, including Microsoft Works, a typing tutor,
Procomm, Printshop and PC USA and PC Globe, basic map and
geography programs. The latter were the only non-tool software in
the standard array. All these programs were accessed through a
standard Project TELL menu which appeared immediately on each
student’s screen. Each computer also had software installed
which allowed the TELL staff to edit batch files from our central
office and to document how often and for what purpose students (or
other family members) were using their equipment. This program
was removed from their computers after the middle school phase of
the research because at that point the equipment belonged solely
to the students and their families.
TELL Students were selected at
random from a pool of eligible candidates in each of five middle
schools, one in each borough of New York City. Eligible students
were those who had scored below the fiftieth percentile (based on
national means) on their fifth grade reading tests. This is the
broadest definition used by the New York Schools to identify
students at risk of dropping out of high school. The majority of
the city's fifth grade students, and especially those from inner
city public schools, fall within this definition and the
proportion increases as students move from primary school to
their middle school years.
In
a few cases, students selected were slightly over the fiftieth
percentile limit. This occurred where the pool of eligible
students and those matched for the comparison group was exhausted
in the random assignment process. We also attempted to
minimize the number of students scoring below the twenty-fifth
percentile to the degree that eligibility pools in the five
schools allowed this. We did so in an effort to minimize the
presence in the treatment group of students with specific
learning disabilities. Although we strongly believe students with
learning disabilities can benefit greatly from use of home
computers, we simply did not have the resources to include
learning disabled students in the intervention (National Council
on Disability 1996). Low scores on fifth grade reading exams
hardly exhaust the range of risks faced by adolescents in
economically depressed communities (Williams and Kornblum 1994).
Once we had selected 124 students (59 girls and 66 boys), we
quickly began to learn about the importance of additional risk
factors in their lives. Many students lived in neighborhoods with
extremely high crime rates and visible street drug activity. For
these boys and girls the home computer often became a refuge from
the street and in a sense a means of escape from the neighborhood
into other worlds. We also began to learn rather quickly
about relative advantages enjoyed by some of the students in
comparison with others. For example, in our intake 57 students (46%)
reported that they lived with both parents. The majority
reported that they lived with one parent, grandparent, or
guardian. Fifty-five percent of the students reported that
a language other than English was spoken in their homes. In
82% of these households Spanish was the primary language. It
should also be noted, however, that only 12 students reported
that they themselves typically speak Spanish in the home, an
indication of the tendency for students of the foreign born to
speak English by preference where possible.
Project TELL students typically come from homes in which there
are a larger than average number of siblings. The mean
number of persons per household (4.5) among TELL students is far
higher than the NYC average of 2.5 persons per household, and
ranges from 2 to 15 persons. If we could compute the number
of persons per room in TELL households we would no doubt also
find that a great many of the children enjoy far less personal
space than children from more affluent homes. In many cases
when we made home visits to TELL families to repair equipment or
to discuss the some aspect of the project with parents we learned
that at least thirty percent of TELL children shared small
bedrooms with two or more other siblings or cousins. We
also visited homes in which TELL children live with a parent and
older and younger siblings in one or two very small rooms. In
these cases the computer represents a large commitment of family
space and there were many home situations in which the lack of
adequate space for the computer became an obstacle to its use.
But in many of the most modest homes, as noted earlier, the
computer very often became a vital window to the outside world of
information and knowledge.
In broadest terms, the goals of this first
phase of Project TELL were: first, to assess any gains in school
performance, self-esteem, writing and typing ability, knowledge
of computers, and school attendance for students who had home
computers; and, second, to describe the lessons learned from
participation in a telecommunications-based learning community
composed of TELL students, their parents and teachers and other
adult mentors from the Project TELL staff and elsewhere. The
central research hypothesis of the middle school phase of Project
TELL was that time spent on tasks of reading and writing in the
purely symbolic environment of computer-based telecommunications
networks would be correlated with individual gains in school
performance.
As we detail shortly, the results
of this phase of the project were, in the main, extremely
positive. Although specific learning gains were largely modest,
an important proportion of students in the treatment group became,
as teachers noted, "turned around" in their performance.
All the students and families became far more committed to
participation in their school than was the case for the
comparison group (as measured by retention rather than disruptive
moves to other schools). And with only two exceptions all the
families took excellent care of the computers, even when changes
in family status or living arrangements presented formidable
problems.
The
College Incentive Phase
Officials of the Bell Atlantic Corporation (then known as NYNEX)
and the Board of Education officials with whom we cooperated in
project design were extremely supportive and encouraged by the
project's richly detailed and largely positive findings in its
first phase. In consequence, the Bell Atlantic sponsors at the
end of 1993 agreed to continue the project through the students'
high school years and to offer a $2,500 scholarship to all
students who graduated and met college admission requirements.
This high school phase of the research is officially referred to
as the Project TELL College Incentive Program.
In the middle school years,
from 1990 to 1993, our students and the comparison group students
were attending five schools. But when they entered high school
they were dispersed over more than fifty different schools. Due
to moves within the city, the metropolitan region, and out of
state, and to changes in some students' family status and living
arrangements, we lost touch with about thirty families between
middle school and high school. It was no longer possible to
keep track of both the TELL students and the comparison students.
This situation established a "natural experiment"
because for the TELL students with whom we remained in contact it
became possible to continue developing our "on-line
learning community" based on email, chat, and bulletin
boards, which would offer these now dispersed students an
opportunity to stay in touch with the project and with each other
through the networks they had access to and were familiar with
since their middle school years. With the encouragement of
our collaborators and sponsors, we placed more emphasis on
developing on-line learning experiences and in seeking ways to
use the technologies to stay in touch with our students and their
parents. The central focus of this phase of Project TELL was to
motivate our students to make more effort in school and to begin
to think of themselves as "college bound."
Over the past four years, while
our students were in high school, we have been experimenting with
computer mediated tutoring systems (on the networks) and have
relied on the communication networks to keep the dispersed group
together as a project. We no longer were able to run weekly
meetings after school, but have been meeting at least once a
month since 1994 at Saturday workshops where we deal with
technical issues, repair and upgrade equipment, introduce more
advanced computer skills, schedule on-line tutoring sessions,
develop job resumes, and much more.
In June of 1997 our students would
have completed the four years of high school. In fact we know of
thirty-four students (out of seventy-four who continued
voluntarily in the Project through June 1997) who did graduate
after the standard four years and will be attending college in
the Fall semester of 1997. We expect an additional ten to fifteen
TELL students to graduate by January 1998 and many of these will
also be attending college. These graduation and college
attendance results are substantially higher than one would expect
in this population.
It is true that
even in the project's middle school phase, the research design
does not allow one to entirely eliminate the "attention
effects" from our findings or observations. Success in
school completion and the Hawthorne effect issues are subjects we
discuss further below. It must be kept in mind, however, that
"attention" in this context refers primarily to
learning activities taking place at a distance, between the
student at home and the adult mentor or teacher who is also
working from a private office or from the comfort of home.
Project TELL is, from this perspective, one of the first
demonstrations of the feasibility and desirability, as well as
the costs and benefits, of online learning after school. There
are strong arguments, from TELL and related demonstrations that
this after school home educational use of the computer is an
extremely exciting frontier of education.
It is quite clear, all
qualifications notwithstanding, that many of our students had
their educational lives changed dramatically by their mastery of
technologies that they otherwise would not have had much exposure
to. The direct effects of time on writing and reading tasks
through participation in computer-based telecommunications
networks to explain a good deal of the positive results which we
report in the results of Project TELL's first phase, to which we
will turn, after this commentary on the implementation.
As a longitudinal study over seven years, the effective
implementation of such a broad-scale project required a great
deal of coordination and manpower as well as a wide variety of
services and equipment.
Bell Atlantic, which provided the primary funding for the implementation of the seven-year project, was represented in the first phase of Project TELL by a full-time Project Director to assist in coordination and technical assistance. Bell Atlantic also provided hardware, training personnel, jobs for students, and workshop space. The Board of Education committed senior staff to serve as resource people, oversaw the instructional telecommunications bulletin board system, NYCENET (First Class), assisted in the identification of teachers to serve as tutors, and in the evaluation of the project by providing student academic reports.
The
Stanton/Heiskell Center (CUNY) was responsible for the research
design and overall administration, management, and implementation
of both phases of the project.
The
CUNY research and technology teams were composed of the Director
of the Center, CUNY doctoral faculty in sociology and psychology,
a Technical Assistant Project Director, a Staff Developer, and a
part-time staff of CUNY graduate students, varying from 5-10 each
year, from diverse disciplines (sociology, psychology, english,
political science, education, computer science, anthropology,
drama, and management) serving as technology, research, and
administrative assistants over the course of the study.
The
delivery and installation of the Project TELL equipment into the
homes was a challenge in terms of security, space
allocation, and basic care and maintenance. A major concern
was the vulnerability of computer equipment in the homes, but
only one computer was stolen. The equipment placed in the homes
was more vulnerable to a common computer menace which the
implementation team had not foreseen – namely and literally,
“bugs.” Insects, attracted perhaps by the warmth of the
equipment, damaged and destroyed a significant number of CPUs,
keyboards, and printers. Unique challenges like this proved more
troublesome than the threat of burglary or loss of the equipment;
indeed, the security of the computers in the home appeared to be
better than school security.
The
initial and ongoing training of students, teachers, and parents
played a major role in the ultimate success of the project. Tasks
as basic as untangling and correctly plugging in the complex set
of electrical wires included in a basic computer setup were often
daunting to teachers and families who had never owned personal
computers. Monthly workshops, held at a Bell Atlantic training
facility, addressed technical issues, repair and upgrades to
equipment, advanced computer skills, online tutoring sessions,
the development of employment resumes, college admission and
financial aid information sessions, and much more. In
addition, the Project TELL Telephone Helpline, which was located
in the Stanton/Heiskell Center’s Telecommunications Lab at
CUNY and staffed by the CUNY technology team was available daily.
During the first phase of the project two-hour weekly user-group
meetings were held in each middle school.
A
major task for the TELL staff in the last year of both phases of
the project was designing and preparing a “transitional
packet” of materials for principals, teachers, students, and
families to help reinforce the skills and knowledge that they had
gained throughout the project. As planned at the outset of TELL I,
the computers became the property of the families after the
conclusion of the third year. In order to help families cope with
the day-to-day difficulties that can arise when using computers,
a maintenance manual that addressed the problems most commonly
encountered by computer users over the course of Project TELL,
titled I’m on My Own, was developed and distributed
to the participants. In addition to the printed manual, all
participants received a new version of the start-up diskette
originally included with their machines. At the conclusion
of the project, a revised edition of I’m on My Own,
updated with information about the upgraded computers and
software, Internet providers, and other technical topics, and a
Project TELL yearbook, organized by a student committee and
edited by the staff were distributed. A graduation ceremony
celebrating both the students’ completion of Project TELL
and their personal graduations from high school, featuring
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed E. Hundt as guest
speaker, was held at the university at the end of the school year.
(See
Appendix A, B and C)
Home Computers Stimulate Educational
Achievement: Effects of the Program, Problems and Obstacles
Project
TELL students made gains in school achievement which are directly
attributable to their access to on-line networks during after-school
hours and on the weekends. Phase one of the project, as noted
above, compared school achievement for TELL students with a
matched sample of middle school peers who did not receive the
equipment.
Gains
in Verbal Ability for TELL students. At the peak of
their use of the computers during the school year (in the seventh
and eighth grades), students averaged twenty minutes a day on the
computer networks. Students on the high-use end of the
distribution were often on line for more than an hour daily.
This was before they had access to the World Wide Web or other
attractive graphic environments and before the Web became as
poplar as it is today. Our students were interacting at high
rates, especially in real time "chat" situations. They
wrote every day to other students, their teachers, and adults
whom they met online. Although students call these interactions
"talk," they are required to read and write to
communicate via the keyboard and the computer. We could
immediately document how these voluntary and compelling
communications positively shaped their writing by forcing them to
pay more attention to punctuation and to the clarity of their
expression. Many of the students also participated in interactive
storyboards which also improved their writing ability. Even
the less active network users learned to touch type and gained a
facility with the computer disk operating system (DOS) and the
techniques of uploading and downloading files which are rarely
found in this population of disadvantaged public school students.
There is also no question but that in the contemporary economy a
basic facility with the techniques of computers and
telecommunications is an advantage in a student's access not only
to career opportunities but to new frontiers of knowledge as well.
Many TELL students understood this or came to do so during the
course of our online experiences.
We
spent many hours with the students in school and in their homes,
thus accumulating a great deal of information about the range of
computer uses and changes in behavior in the student group and
among their siblings and their parents. The Project also held a
limited number of highly successful parent workshops to teach the
basics of word processing and the use of personal computers. Most
members of the TELL staff agreed that if resources had permitted
we would have potentially reached even more students by extending
more training opportunities to parents and siblings.
Figure 1 presents the summary data
about change in scores on standardized tests of verbal ability
for TELL students versus the matched comparison group. Note
that for both groups the average reading score (expressed in
percentile on the national norms) declines quite dramatically
between the fifth and six grades, as students make the disruptive
transition from primary to middle school. For the comparison
group, these scores improve somewhat over the three middle school
years but never attain the fifth grade level. For TELL students,
however, the situation is quite different. Their average score
increased markedly between the sixth and seventh grade and there
is a small net gain between the fifth and eighth grades (36.4 -
38.7). (Seventh grade group mean differences are significant at
the 0.015 level.)
Improvements in average reading scores for the TELL group, a
skeptic might argue, are rather modest and do not exceed the
fiftieth percentile. But these group means mask the performance
of twenty eight TELL students who made dramatic gains, of over
fifteen percentage
points,
in their reading scores and often went above the national mean.
Figure 2 compares histograms of fifth and eighth grade reading
scores where the influence of these twenty-eight students is
clearly evident on the right side of the graphs. Analysis of the
actual writing and its volume for these students, when they
logged on to one of the two communications networks and sent
email to us, clearly establishes a direct link between
communication over the networks and improvements in verbal
abilities.
School
Performance and Time Online. TELL students who made
the greatest gains in school spent more time using their home
computers and engaging in on-line network activities than others
did. All on-line activities involved reading and writing in the
symbolic environment of computer networks. At its height of
popularity in the seventh and eighth grades, TELL students spent
an average of almost twenty minutes a day online, but again,
these averages mask a more important result. Figure 3 shows that
TELL students varied greatly in the amount of time they spent on-line.
Each of the bars in the figures represents the number of times an
individual student logged on to the school system's
telecommunications network, NYCENET where TELL was afforded its
own area with bulletin boards and email. Students could then go
to other menus on NYCENET to engage in real-time chat "discussions,"
to conduct research using the on-line encyclopedias, download
games or software. In each school, as the graphs indicate, there
were a handful of heavy network users who tended to logon every
day and spend hours reading and writing which is unlikely they
would have done otherwise. With only two or three exceptions,
these students became the core group of those who made gains in
school performance and eventually graduated from high school and
are attending college.
The graphs also show that there were
students in each school who hardly ever
participated
in the computer networks. While they may have been using their
computers as freestanding equipment, the data we have on usage
indicates that for the most part this was not the case. This low
use of networks by some TELL students, and lower use of their
computers more generally, has a number of explanations. In many
cases these students lived in homes where phone service was
highly problematic. Often it was physically difficult for
students to connect their modems into the family phone,
especially if that phone was in a relative's apartment as often
turned out to be the case. The phone company supplied us with
separate lines only for network use in these cases, but there
were often difficulties in securing these lines from uses by
visiting kin and friends. In other cases even this special phone
access was disrupted by family dislocations and many months would
pass before we could reestablish phone access.
In still other cases,
approximately fifteen- percent, the computers and network access
simply did not appeal to the student or lost their appeal after
the first year. There may have been other attractions in the
streets, competition from jobs babysitting or working outside the
home, and many other competing activities including television.
It should be emphasized here that TELL students were not selected
from a universe of students who had volunteered to work with home
computers and networks. Random selection meant that there would
be range of behaviors toward the technologies, including almost
indifference born out of early and continual frustration.
Gender and Home Computer Use. We found essentially
no gender differences in students’ use of the technologies
or their interest in computers and the Internet. Research
conducted in school settings often finds strong gender
differences, with boys seemingly more interested and active users
than girls (Brunet and Proulex 1989 in Siefert et al 1989). The
fact that they had access to the computers and networks from
their homes, on the other hand, seems to have
mitigated
this gender effect. While the girls were somewhat less likely to
play action games on their PCs, they were no less likely than
boys to express an interest in computers and to demonstrate that
interest by spending time on line and at their keyboards. By the
end of the middle school phase of the project there were at least
as many girls as boys in the top third of computer and network
users and just as many girls who expressed interest in learning
more about computer science as boys.
In the second phase of the project we worked with students who
volunteered to continue in Project TELL during their high school
years. The eighty students who participated to varying degrees in
this phase of the project were a sub-sample of the original
population. We describe this group below and show that access to
home computers, with continuing support from Project TELL staff,
resulted in higher rates of high school completion and college
attendance than we would normally have expected. This section of
the study summarizes the measures we found most effective in
encouraging students to set their sights on college educations.
It also documents how contact over the computer networks
facilitated passage through high school as well as the college
application process.
High School graduation and
beyond. Out of the original 125 students who were
selected for Project Tell in 1990, we currently know the
whereabouts of 105. The others have either moved from the area or
are at unknown addresses in New York City. Out of these 105
students, there are seventy-four who have voluntarily been active
in Project TELL during their high school years, the College
Incentive phase of the project. Of these, approximately 60 appear
at this writing to be certain to graduate from high school either
in June 1997 (after four years) or in January 1998 or June 1998.
Thirty four TELL students, forty six percent of those seventy
four students active in the second phase of the project,
graduated with their class in June 1997.
The New York City High Schools presently
graduate forty nine percent of their students within four years.
This figure includes all students. Project TELL students,
however, were considered to be "at risk" of school
leaving due to verbal test scores below the 50th percentile. The
NYC Board of Education does not publish statistics on graduation
rates of "at risk" students, but it is certainly far
lower than the overall average. In addition, with only a few
exceptions, Project TELL students are either African American or
Hispanic. The graduation rate for all minority students from NYC
High Schools is 41%, lower than the graduation rate of TELL
Students who participated in the College Incentive phase of the
project.
Among the interventions during
TELL's second phase which help account for the relative success
in high school completion and college applications, the following
must be noted prominently:
--The
interaction of in-person and on-line learning activities
--
On-line and in-person tutoring
--
Computer upgrades for network access
--
A job opportunity program
--
On-line and in-person college advisement.
The
following discussion highlights the contribution of each of these
interventions to the overall Project. But each deserves a more
detailed and critical analysis which they will have in subsequent
TELL papers devoted to them as major subjects.
On-Line
and In-Person Learning Activities. During the
students’ high school years we conducted monthly workshops
at a telephone company-training center in the Chelsea community
of Manhattan. These sessions were devoted to workshops about
computer and network skills, assessment of student progress,
motivational activities and encounters with exemplary young
adults, peer socializing, school and college advisement,
discussions with parents, and tutoring in math and other subjects.
All these activities were scheduled as needed, based on
discussions among staff and TELL students.
We
had learned in the first phase of the Project that on-line
contacts and activities are not a replacement for in-person
gatherings. In fact, on-line communication greatly heightens the
desire of adolescents (and adults) to actually meet each other.
The on-line learning community had formed peer relationships,
mediated by email and chat, among TELL students who live at
relatively great distances from each other within the city. The
opportunity to actually get together and see each other became,
over the years, an increasingly motivating experience for further
participation in the Project. As the students became capable of
using mass transit to travel to a central location, it became
possible to use our monthly workshops for a range of activities
that would stimulate the students' continuing participation in on-line
activities and would motivate students to complete major academic
steps such as passing required competency exams and, in many
cases, more advanced New York State Regents exams.
Annual field trips and a weekend
retreat where students tested themselves in Upward Bound
challenges also served to create a core of students who began to
take leadership roles in the Project. Eight of these students
also participated in a summer Youth Travel Initiative in Costa
Rica and Ghana where they worked with host country peers in rural
development projects. This proved of each to be the outstanding
learning experience of their high school years and one which
stimulated them to renew their efforts to communicate with others
in the Project and elsewhere over the networks.
On-line and In-Person
Tutoring. TELL students who actively participated
in the project's phase two activities could avail themselves of
tutoring opportunities by making contact on line with
professional tutors (New York high school teachers and City
University Graduate Students) in the academic areas they needed
help with. Students and tutors were able to communicate on line
about specific tutoring needs and were able, in some cases,
through the use of email and chat, to actually exchange work and
learning exercises.
These on-line tutoring resources
tended to be underutilized. Especially in mathematics, the
limitations of existing networks did not allow for efficient
communication using mathematical notation. In the last year of
the Project we were able to begin experimenting with new tutoring
software, but earlier efforts at on-line tutoring mainly resulted
in establishing relationships between tutors and students which
could be followed up on at workshops and in phone conversations.
Our continual emphasis on the students’ tutoring needs,
however, did clearly focus attention of students’ family
members on the Project's desire to help students complete high
school.
Some of the limitations of our
tutoring efforts were technological. Students’ computers
needed to be upgraded so that tutoring and practice in math and
other subjects could be based on more effective software systems.
But there were other extremely pressing reasons why upgrades
became a major challenge for Project staff and students that had
to do with the breakneck speed of change in the nature of
telecommunications networks and the personal computers used to
access them.
Computer
Upgrades: Keeping Pace with the Technology. When
our students received their equipment in the sixth grade, IBM PS2
computers and 1200 Baud modems were top of the line consumer
level products. Two or three years later they were essentially
obsolete (although for home uses they remained quite valuable).
Most networks, including that of the New York Schools (NYCENET)
on which we depended, were abandoning the older text-only
environment in favor of a windows and graphics environment. To
keep our students engaged on the network and to offer access to
the highly visible and exciting World Wide Web, we desperately
needed to upgrade their computers to at least 386 machines which
could run a version of Windows compatible with the upgraded
NYCENET system. Again our invaluable corporate sponsors came to
the rescue. They provided the used 386 machines and the
budgetary resources necessary to equip these reconditioned
machines with more powerful modems. In some cases, where we
wanted to experiment with newer tutoring software in the Project's
last year, we were able to purchase Pentium computers with faster
modems. We based priorities for distributing new equipment as it
became available on evidence that students were participating in
the project's on-line and in-person activities. This policy
created strong incentives for more consistent participation in
the project and more attentiveness to schoolwork. Students also
were aware that conscientious participation in project activities
would help them compete for a limited number of summer and after-school
jobs for which the Project staff were able to make referrals.
Work Opportunities through Project TELL.
Students from inner city communities are often completely unaware
of how to go about seeking part-time work, a trait they share
with students from most other backgrounds. But TELL students
share with thousands of others from dense inner city
neighborhoods the limited personal or family resources which can
lead to part time work of any kind. At the same time, they
have intense needs for spending money, without which it becomes
impossible to dress in what they consider appropriate fashion or
to explore the city without jumping turnstiles. Against this
particular dearth of opportunity the computer often became a
small profit center. In the middle school years, frequently there
were students who discovered for themselves that knowledge of
computers could lead to income opportunities. Quite a few
students in the seventh and eighth grades reported using programs
like Print Shop to do party banners and cards for neighbors who
paid them small sums. These were extremely gratifying experiences
for these students and often reinforced a perception that
knowledge of computers and their software could lead to jobs and
income opportunities. The Project staff never advertised computer
skills as essential for job preparation. Our emphasis tended to
be far more on computers as aids to the education process. But
parents, teachers, and peers often spoke about the job-related
aspects of computer skills and many of our students also believed
in this connection.
In their second year of high school, when they were
fifteen and sixteen, we developed an on-line resume bank. At
workshops and on line, students were instructed in how to develop
a resume. They were asked to download their draft resumes to the
Project office over NYCENET. These drafts were edited and sent
back to the students by email with an attached file for revision.
Through this process we reinforced knowledge of the techniques of
moving documents over the networks for a purpose that was
immediately reinforcing to the students. As we arrived at
acceptable versions of the students' resumes these were posted
online and sent to prospective employers. At any given time
during the second phase of the project we had ten to fifteen
students in part time employment in the university, in their
communities, and in some interested corporations. During the
summer the Bell Atlantic Corporation employed at least ten TELL
students who passed their rather rigorous screening examination.
Every student who worked on a part time job through Project TELL
reported that basic knowledge of computers and networks, word
processing, data bases and spread sheets, modems and printer
management, were extremely useful skills even though these skills
were rarely the direct requirements for employment. Many of these
same skills proved to be extremely useful in the college
application process.
College Advisement and Applications. The
Project Tell learning community's on-line capabilities and adult
resources were of invaluable use during the stressful process of
college applications. As any parent of a college-bound student
knows, this is typically a difficult period for the high school
senior and the entire family. Students face difficult or
confusing decisions about where to seek admissions, how to study
for the College Board examinations, how to apply for financial
aid, and how to write their essays. In the student population we
worked with, these steps are particularly difficult due to the
relative lack of resources to draw on for help in the application
process. College advisors are uniformly overburdened at most
large urban high schools. The college advisor may have four
hundred or more students to deal with, so the student who has
waited on line outside the office may only to receive the most
perfunctory advice. Students with mediocre grades and SAT scores
are so numerous and so likely to procrastinate in the face of all
the stress and uncertainty that college advisors naturally find
themselves devoting the most attention to those students with the
best admissions potential and the most personal motivation to
complete the application process.
Through numerous online activities we continually reinforced and
supported TELL students own efforts to apply to colleges. We
worked with students at monthly workshops to begin writing
college essays and helped frame these essays to reflect the
students' achievements in the Project and elsewhere. Once the
students had the beginnings of the essays on the computer and
posted to us through NYCENET, we could exchange drafts and
comments on the work with students on an individual basis with
relative efficiency. Our graduating seniors began to understand
that their participation for the past seven years in a university-based
telecommunications research project gave them distinct advantages
in the application process, especially as their on-line tutors
helped them incorporate writing about the project in their essays.
We were also able to advise students about the details of
financial aid, including aid for college tuition from Bell
Atlantic which they receive upon enrollment, and opportunities
for attending colleges out of the city through special financial
aid programs.
The
success of this college application process can be measured by
admission of Project TELL students to Georgetown, Syracuse,
Wesleyan, Hofstra, and many State University of New York and City
University campuses, for a total of twenty four admissions by
June 1997, with others to be enrolled in Spring 1998. A number of
TELL students who might have attended college chose instead to
join a branch of the military service where entry is now as
competitive as admission to a four year college.
In summary, these are highlights
of Project Tell's second phase. But achievements like these
depended entirely on the development of the learning community
and student commitment to the Project. That commitment, in turn,
was only made possible by the activities of a dedicated staff.
Computers and information networks greatly facilitated all
aspects of our work with the students and their families, and it
is certain that possession of computers and development of
technological skills were powerful motivating features of the
Project. But continual involvement of concerned adults in the
lives of TELL students, through direct contacts and over the
information networks, was essential to each student's progress
toward higher education.
Results of the first phase of
Project TELL make a convincing case for immediate measures to
more equitably disseminate computing and network capabilities to
the homes of families with children in primary schools. With the
requisite adult involvement in the development of online learning
communities, it should be possible to prevent underachievement
and school failure in at least one third of those homes where
children are falling behind as their verbal abilities and
motivation to do school work falters. This may strike some
readers as an almost utopian statement and there are ample
observers of computers in education who believe with some reason
that the benefits of these technologies are currently oversold (Oppenheimer
1997; Stoll 1996). It is also true that there are many possible
interventions, including direct provision of tutors, motivational
Upward Bound style experiences, after school programs, and others
which could also, if adopted in given communities, have similar
if not even more robust effects. The Project TELL research
demonstrates, however, that home computers and internet access,
along with training in their use and continual adult and student
interactions in an online learning environment can also "turn
around" a significant number of underachieving inner city
students. And the same intervention, based on a single investment
in the technologies, can work for other siblings in the
family and can have important implications for adult members of
the family by effectively lengthening the school day while it
brings new forms of entertainment into the home.
In
consequence, the following recommendations can be justified by
the direct implications off Project TELL and related research.
1.
Encourage early family access to information technologies.
There
is a good deal of research which shows that gains children make
in pre-school programs and other early educational enrichment
interventions begin to degrade after three or four years of
primary school (Houk 1997). Clearly there are no magical formulas
to reverse these declines. Nor will access to computers and
information networks (with dedicated adults involved in them)
reverse these declines in all students. But we have shown that
for a significant proportion of students, the information
technologies at issue here can compete with television and the
lure of the streets for students’ attention. There is every
indication that the array of educational experiences available on
the Internet will improve exponentially in the next few years. In
the seven years during which Project TELL has operated, for
example, we have seen the industry finally move away from
standard "drill and practice" software for tutoring at
all levels to far more interactive and diagnostically
sophisticated learning software in most disciplines.
Project TELL students made immediate
gains in the length of time they spent reading and writing
because of the interest they took in writing to peers and adults
over telecommunications networks. There is no reason why this
same experience cannot be replicated with even younger children.
By the third and fourth grades, if not sooner, children are
capable of navigating their way around computers and information
networks (Papert 1994; Skinner 1997). If they are to be effective
as educational interventions, however, these activities require
careful planning and on-line adult involvement. In the ideal
situation they also benefit from close integration with the
students’ actual schools and teachers.
It is probably only a matter of
time before there will be applications and programs available to
children on the Internet which have the mass attraction and
educational impact that television programs like Sesame Street
had in their early years. A central question in this regard is
whether children from low-income homes will share in the
discovery and actual development (as audiences) of such resources.
Part of the answer to this question will depend on how well the
information technologies are adapted to the needs of students and
teachers in urban settings, and especially those in inner city
school districts.
2.
Continue demonstration research to address issues of
technologies, cost, and software
At this writing the
Texas State Education Department is seriously considering the
possibility of providing all its primary school students with a
lap top computer. This easily portable instrument can contain all
the student’s school books and school work, it can be the
link to a far wider world of knowledge beyond the classroom, and
can make students feel their schooling is oriented to their needs
in the future as well as those of the present. It is unlikely
that this proposal will be adopted without further planning and
demonstration research. Yet even the fact that it is being
seriously considered in one of the nation's largest school
administrations is an indication that it is time to look very
seriously at how to more effectively and equitably extend the
educational benefits of computing and telecommunications
technologies to American families. In the present environment of
rapidly changing computer and telecommunications technologies
this is a considerable problem.
New technologies like WebTV may be means of
providing the basic access and computing needs to allow more
families and students to share the experience of participation in
online learning communities. Even could they afford to do so, few
families with modest or low incomes would be well advised to
purchase Pentium type computers with all the necessary trimmings
and subscriptions to Internet providers while there is the risk
that in a year or two all this equipment may become obsolete. The
terminal and low cost Internet service promised by direct TV
applications may be at least a good interim approach. But to
determine if this is so will require further research and
demonstrations such as Project TELL.
3.
Incorporate online learning opportunities in plans for
educational reform
New York State's Board of Regents has
recently announced an ambitious new set of requirements for high
school graduation. These will require far more rigorous science,
math, foreign language, and English standards and tests. At the
same time, there has been almost no effort made or resources
developed to assist students and teachers in meeting these more
demanding requirements. Similar changes are developing throughout
the United States. The New York City public schools and other
large urban systems are struggling to comply with these new
requirements, usually in the face of diminishing resources and
continuing attacks on public education. There are no quick
"techno-fix" solutions to these problems. On the
other hand, it is clear from the results of Project TELL that
computer mediated learning communities can play a positive role
in helping teachers, students, and families find the educational
resources that will help them cope with the new demands. But it
will be necessary to take measures to train far more teachers in
the use and access to online learning resources. It will also be
necessary to find creative solutions to the problems of family
access.
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