A child's letter to Proteo.
UC LINKS RESEARCH
Evaluating Children's Writing Development at Club Proteo
BY GUADALUPE ARTEAGA, RICHARD DURÁN, AND THERESA MOORE
Each afternoon, Lupe Arteaga conducts the Club Proteo mail call. She reads aloud the names of children who have received letters from "Proteo," the Club's imaginary leader, and hands each child his or her letter. Although none of the children has ever seen Proteo, they are excited to correspond with this magical being, and many Club members approach Lupe before afternoon activities begin to ask if they will be receiving any mail that day.
Club Proteo is a UC Links after-school program in Goleta, a community adjacent to UC Santa Barbara. In the Club, UCSB undergraduates support children as they engage in a variety of educational activities. This past year, Club Proteo staff have promoted writing as a central Club activity and have developed methods to assess the impact of Club participation on children's writing competence. We recognize that strong writing skills are important as students prepare for college, and we believe that it is never too early to encourage children to write regularly and to enjoy writing.
Our work was supported by a grant from the UC Office of the President. With this funding, our research team at UC Santa Barbara collaborated with researchers at UC Los Angeles to evaluate the writing of children in two UC Links sites.
Our colleagues at UCLA had told us that children in their UC Links after-school program, Las Redes, wrote letters each afternoon to El Maga, the imaginary "creator" of that program. At first we considered daily letter writing an impossible goal for children in Club Proteo. In our experience, children rarely volunteered to participate in the evaluation activities we researchers and staff members designed. But, inspired by the Las Redes team, we planned daily letter writing to Proteo as part of our Club activities.
Writing in the everyday world is for authentic communication purposes. We therefore hoped that children would view their correspondence as an authentic exchange with Proteo—a challenging goal since children know that Proteo is an "imaginary" being.
To achieve this goal, we needed to help Proteo develop "personality" so that children would want to write to this unseen character. Proteo's letters would build on children's interests and respond to their questions.
We had noticed children's enthusiasm for creating and viewing computer-generated art. Proteo responded to this enthusiasm by importing clip art pictures in each letter. The children often commented on the artistic nature of the letters they received, and some of them included clip art in their own letters back to Proteo.
The computer was an important tool in Club Proteo letter-writing activities. Children used Microsoft Word to write letters to Proteo and sent the letters via e-mail. Proteo, in turn, responded via e-mail. Thus, in addition to serving as a resource for playing educational games, the computer was a central part of daily writing activity at the Club.
Although we did encounter significant challenges, we were successful beyond our wildest expectations. Over the course of the year, children wrote almost 300 letters to Proteo. During assessment periods, which typically lasted for two days, we collected as many as 26 writing products in a single day. Not only were children writing, they were also expressing genuine interest in corresponding with Proteo. Children frequently asked to write to Proteo, even on days when they had not received a letter.
In order to evaluate the effects of increased attention to writing at the Club, we administered matched pre and post assessments to children at the beginning and end of the Fall quarter, 2001, and at the end of the Spring quarter, 2002. We looked at children's performance in two genres, letters and stories.
Children were free to choose whether or not they would participate in any Club writing activity. However, we encouraged children to participate during assessment periods by telling them that their participation in assessments would ensure their "admission" to parties and field trips held by Club Proteo.
We told undergraduates not to help children with writing in any way during the assessment periods. During the non-assessment periods, however, we asked undergraduates to help as much as possible in support of children's increasing self-reliance. Thus, during most of the year, undergraduate students from UC Santa Barbara helped children become independent letter writers whenever children asked for help. Occasionally children also asked for help with other forms of writing. In this way, undergraduate support stimulated children's writing development as part of the regular practices of Club Proteo, but children's performance on the writing assessments reflected what they could do on their own.
Performance on both letter and narrative writing prompts were blind scored by two independent raters. We assessed children's mastery of grammar and spelling, ability to master a letter or narrative genre, and fluency as reflected in number of words written. Inter-scorer reliability was over .95. Students showed a statistically significant gain in their pre-post performance on writing measures for letters, but not on writing measures for narratives. Children did perform slightly better on narrative post assessment writing tasks, but these gains did not reach statistical significance.
Our results support the hypothesis that focused attention to writing and support of writing in a specific genre during after-school computer activities is associated with statistically significant improvements in writing in that genre. We do not find these gains to be statistically significant, however, in writing that was not the focus of club activities and support by competent staff. For example, Club Proteo members did little narrative writing outside of the assessment periods. One of our computer games, Storybook Weaver, gave children an opportunity to write stories, but the bulk of children's writing was done in the form of letters to Proteo.
Our work in Club Proteo suggests that writing need not be an "unnatural" after-school activity in out-of-school settings. Furthermore, attention to meaningful writing outside of school can improve students' literacy skills related to the development of academic literacy. We conclude that after-school programs that have specific cognitive and literacy goals must pay adequate and focused attention to the development of skills reflecting these goals as part of the practices that make up daily program activities.
Club Proteo is just one of several UC Links programs throughout the state that focus on literacy. A number of other sites have also developed innovative writing activities. In addition to our colleagues in Las Redes at UC Los Angeles, the Humanities Out There UC Links program at UC Irvine develops children's skills in creative writing, and the DUSTY UC Links program at UC Berkeley teaches children and older community members to create multimedia "digital stories." We are eager to learn from this exciting work and look forward to hearing from other UC Links sites that offer writing and publication activities.
All three authors of this article are members of the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara. Guadalupe Arteaga is a masters student who serves as site coordinator for Club Proteo. Professor Richard Durán is co-principal investigator of the UC Santa Barbara UC Links project and director of the Club Proteo writing evaluation project. Theresa Moore is a doctoral candidate. She is currently using part of the data discussed in this article in her dissertation study on multiple literacies at Club Proteo.
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