Ph.D. Theses
Bruce Burnam (2001)
The ethical dilemmas facing children involved in the home and school use of computers and the Internet.
Advisor: Yasmin Kafai
As greater numbers of children get involved with computers and the Internet, they are faced with the ambiguities and lack of clear cut boundaries regarding what is right and wrong. As a result, a new range of problems has been brought on through unethical and illegal use of the computer, including invasion of privacy, creation and proliferation of computer viruses, software and intellectual theft, and hacking. These uses involve moral issues like honesty, responsibility, confidentiality, trust, accountability, fairness, and what is right and wrong. Within the school environment, many educators and institutions have reacted to the ambiguities and dilemmas brought forth by computers by instituting Acceptable Use Policies, which set down specific, detailed rules for using both computers and the Internet. It is unclear to what extent students actually apply these rules to moral dilemmas regarding computer and Internet use. It is even more ambiguous within the private domain of the home, where there may or may not be rules or constant supervision. This study examines children’s moral reasoning regarding their use of computers and the Internet. An analysis of student responses and rationales are used to address the following research questions: (1) Are there differences in moral reasoning in computer and Internet use between school and home context? (2) Are there developmental differences in moral reasoning between the participating children (comparing fifth and eighth graders)? (3) Does computer experience have an impact on children’s moral reasoning? and (4) Are there gender differences?
Cynthia Carter Ching (2000)
Apprenticeship, Learning and Technology: Children as Oldtimers and Newcomers in the Culture of Learning through Design.
Advisor: Yasmin Kafai
This study deals with the construct of apprenticeship, a well-documented phenomena in anthropological and cultural studies, but which is treated here in unique ways. Whereas most existing work examines apprenticeship among adults in traditional vocational settings, this research is situated among a community of fourth and fifth grade schoolchildren with different levels of previous experience "learning through design" and programming science simulations, thus making them relative oldtimers and newcomers to the culture and practices of design. This work examines teams of children as they create computer simulations, and documents the practices that characterize their apprenticeship to one another. This research also investigates how cognitive benefits realized in an apprenticeship environment are distinctive from that in non-apprenticeship classroom communities, due to the addition of a comparison group of fourth and fifth grade students all engaged in learning through design for the first time. Results reveal that the learning benefits realized in an apprenticeship environment are characterized not by a significant difference over the comparison class in the amount of science content or programming code students mastered, but rather in the extent to which students in the apprenticeship classroom are better able to use the context of design to help them represent science knowledge in a systemic manner. The results of this study have implications for broadening the accepted definitions of "apprenticeship" in the literature, curriculum design and implementation of design-based learning, and pedagogy and policy for the technology-infused classroom.
Susan Marshall (2001)
Planning in Context: A Situated View of Children’s Management of Science Projects
Advisor: Yasmin Kafai
This study investigated children’s collaborative planning of a complex, long-term software design project. Using sociocultural methods, it examined over time the development of design teams’ planning negotiations and tools to document the co-construction of cultural frameworks to organize teams’ shared understanding of what and how to plan. Results indicated that student teams developed frameworks to address a set of common planning functions that included design planning, project metaplanning (things such as division of labor or sharing of computer resources) and team collaboration management planning. There were also some between-team variations in planning frameworks, within a bandwidth of options. Teams engaged in opportunistic planning, which reflected shifts in strategies in response to new circumstances over time. Team members with past design project experience ("oldtimers") demonstrated the transfer of their planning framework to the current design task, and they supported the developing participation of "newcomers." Teams constructed physical tools (e.g. planning boards) that acted as visual representations of teams’ planning frameworks, and inscriptions of team thinking. The assigned functions of the tools also shifted over time with changing project circumstances. The discussion reexamines current approaches to the study of planning and discusses their educational implications.
Ed.D. Theses
Kathryn Morrison (1999)
Children reading commercial messages on educational web sites: Perceptions of advertising, information, and inviting places.
Advisor: Yasmin Kafai
Getting schools and children on-line is one of the educational priorities in the U.S. However, very little is known about how children perceive the value of Web sites and how they perceive the messages contained in them. The purpose of this study is to guide children through a variety of educational Web sites, observing the hyperlinks the children choose, asking them to report on their perceptions of which on-screen messages are "advertising," and to critique the available information and activities. Using pre-selected educational Web sites, ranging from university-sponsored learning projects to entertainment-sponsored activity sites, subjects will participate in a guided exploration of the sites as well as an independent exploration period. Children’s perceptions of the messages on the sites will be explored through a combination of written questionnaire, paper-and-pencil evaluation, and small-group interview. This will be an exploratory study that asks: What do children classify as "advertising" in the on-line environment (where lines between "programming" and advertising are blurred--for example, more blurred than on TV)? Discussion topics in interviews will cover: How do children perceive, use, and recall both the educational content and the implicit messages contained in educational Web sites: (1) How do children classify these sites? (2) What activities do they find appealing and which do they participate in? (3) What messages do they remember as most pertinent? (4) Would they return to a particular site, and if so, for what purpose? (5) Would they recommend a particular site to a friend; why or why not? (6) Do they think their parents and/or teachers would encourage their use of a particular site; why or why not? Outcomes and timeliness.
MA Theses
Bruce Burnam (1999).
Ethics and the computer: Moral reasoning and development in the domain of computer and Internet use.
Advisor: Yasmin Kafai
With increasing computer use in classrooms, there has been a growing concern of the resulting moral dilemmas that may emanate from their use. Though theorists have conducted extensive research on children’s’ moral development, there has been little attempt to situate this within the digital domain. It is the purpose of this paper to examine children’s moral reasoning in relation to their use of computers and the Internet. Children’s moral understandings fell into the expected developmental levels. Significant differences were found between children’s moral reasoning in everyday situations compared to those involving computer and Internet use.
T. Rocco (2000)
Information technology in the classroom of the future: Pre-service teachers’ beliefs about the use of computers in the curriculum.
Advisor: Yasmin Kafai
Ken Daniszewski (2000)
An analysis of the role of narrative within pedagogical discourse in two high school science classrooms.
Advisor: William Sandoval
This paper presents and discusses the results of a study on the use of narrative discourse by two high school science teachers as they teach a unit on evolution. The purpose of this study was to better understand the nature of pedagogical narrative discourse as spontaneously employed by teachers in a naturalistic setting. Three typical interactional patterns related to narrative were observed. Overall, the results of this study imply that pedagogical narratives may differ in certain systematic ways from conventional narratives, and that these pedagogical narratives might usefully be considered as a separate category or subgenre of narrative and that this type of narrative discourse merits further study.
Student Publications
Burnam, B. & Kafai, Y. B. (2001). Computers and ethics: Children’s moral reasoning about computer and Internet uses. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 25(2), 111-125.
Ching, C. C., Kafai, Y. B., & Marshall, S. (2000). Spaces for change: Gender and technology access in collaborative software design projects. Journal for Science Education and Technology 9(1), 45–56. Also in N. Yelland & A. Rubin (in press). Ghosts in the machine: Women study women and technology. New York: Peter Land Publishers.
Kafai, Y. B., Ching, C. C., & Marshall, S. (1998). Children as designers of educational multimedia software. Computers & Education, 29(2/3), 117-126.
Kafai, Y. B., Franke, M., Ching, C., & Shih, J. (1998). Games as interactive learning environments fostering teachers’ and students’ mathematical thinking. International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning, 3(2), 149-193.
Kafai, Y. B., & Ching, C. C. (2001). Affordances of collaborative software design planning for elementary students’ science talk. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 10(3), 323-363.
Kafai, Y. B., Ching, C. C., & Marshall, S. (in press). Learning affordances of collaborative multimedia design. In M. Rabinowitz, F. C. Blumberg, & H. Everson (Eds.), The impact of media and technology on instruction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Conference Papers
Ching, C. C., Kafai, Y. B. & Marshall, S. (1998). Give girls some space: Considering gender in collaborative software programming activities. In T. Ottmann & I. Tomek (Eds.), Proceedings of the Ed-Media/Ed-Telecom conference (pp. 56–61). Charlottesville, VA: AACT.
Goldberg, J., Kim, H. & Enyedy, N. (2001). Critical choices and outcomes in inquiry science classrooms: Video comparisons of different classroom practices for environmental science. Symposium paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA.
Kafai, Y. B. & Ching, C. C. (1996). Meaningful Contexts for Mathematical Learning: The Potential of Game Making Activities. In D. C. Edelson & E. A. Domeshek (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Learning Sciences (pp. 164–171). Charlottesville, VA: AACE.
Kafai, Y. B., & Ching, C. C. (1998). Science talk in software design contexts: Children’s scientific discourse as a situated activity. In A. S. Bruckman, M. Guzdial, J. L Kolodner, & A. Ram (Eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Learning Sciences (pp. 160-166). Charlottesville, VA: AACE.
Kafai, Y. B. Ching, C. C., & Marshall, S. (1998). Learning affordances of collaborative educational multimedia design by children. In T. Ottmann & I. Tomek (Eds.), Proceedings of the Ed-Media/Ed-Telecom conference (pp. 178–184). Charlottesville, VA: AACT.
Marshall, S. & Kafai, Y. B. (1998). Children’s development of planning tools for managing complex software design projects. In A. S. Bruckman, M. Guzdial, J. L Kolodner, & A. Ram (Eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Learning Sciences (pp. 202-208). Charlottesville, VA: AACE.
Muir, K. & Enyedy, N. (2001). No simple answers, the complex contradictions of identity and practice: Interviews with teachers about who they are and how they teach. Symposium paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA.
Sandoval, W. A., Daniszewski, K., Spillane, J., & Reiser, B. J. (1999). Teachers' discourse strategies for supporting learning through inquiry. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Assn. Montreal, April 19-23.
Sandoval, W. A., & Morrison, K. (2000). "You can't believe in a theory that's wrong": High school students' ideas about theories and theory change. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Assn. New Orleans, April 24-28.
