UC LINKS RESEARCH
Picturing the University: A Study of Children's Drawings
BY NANCY CHRISTENSEN
In the drawing, a smiling person points to a square object on a table. The artist's caption reads, "This is a picture of a UCI student telling us what are the parts of a computer and how to use it." The artist, an upper elementary student at Hoover Elementary School in Santa Ana, has drawn an undergraduate who is friendly, welcoming, and willing to share helpful information. Another child has drawn a self-portrait: "Here I am with my best friend at the library. I like to read. University is great."
During the 1999-2000 academic year, I collected 232 such drawings of university students by Hoover fourth and fifth graders. As a member of the UC Links team at UC Irvine, I had observed activities in the Cosmic Dimension, a program that regularly brought UCI undergraduates to Hoover Elementary to work and play with children after school. Time and again, I saw university students establish warm and mutually beneficial bonds with Hoover children. Were these bonds encouraging children to see themselves as future college students? I wondered.
In my dissertation, Fourth and Fifth Grade Latino Students' Perceptions of a Student at a University: An Examination of Children's Drawings and their Relationship to Participation in an After-School Computer Club with University Mentors, I was interested in the impact of the UC Links intervention: Did fourth and fifth grade Hoover Elementary students who had participated with UCI undergraduate mentors in the Cosmic Dimension After School Computer Club develop positive images about post-secondary education?
Hoover Elementary, 12 miles from the UC Irvine campus, serves a predominantly Latino immigrant population. More than 1000 students attended Hoover in 1999-2000. Ninety-five percent were English language learners, and many were recent immigrants. Eighty-three percent of the students received free or reduced-price lunches.
More than 350 Hoover students participated in the UC Links Cosmic Dimension Computer Club during the year. Over the same period, 79 undergraduates were enrolled in a UC Irvine practicum course that required them to collaborate as mentors, friends, and play partners in the Cosmic Dimension for three hours each week. Undergraduates were free to interact with any club member who attended, and they were encouraged to talk with younger students about post-secondary education, career goals, and personal aspirations.
I drew the theoretical basis for my study from Howard Gardner's theories of cultural models and mental schema. Gardner asserts that the two major goals of education across time and place are the modeling of adult roles and the transmission of cultural values. He postulates that the cultural models to which students are exposed influence their beliefs about how the world is and how it should be. I believed that UC Links mentors introduced positive images of post-secondary education to the students in the computer club, and I expected to find that the club members had internalized these images.
In designing my research instrument, I relied on work by David Lewis and James Green, who argued that children's drawings are symbolic representations of their personal view of the world, and Merryl Goldberg, who claimed that children’s drawings evidence their understanding of concepts. A number of researchers have found that a simple instrument with minimal instructions results in drawings that are rich in detail. Other studies found that children's descriptions of their own drawings were a valuable source of data.
All fourth and fifth grade students at Hoover Elementary School were asked by their teacher to draw a picture of a student at a university and to write a brief description of the picture. Of the 232 fourth- and fifth-grade Hoover students who participated in the study, 75 were members of the Cosmic Dimension After School Computer Club. These children were designated the treatment group. The other 157 children who did not participate in the club were designated the comparison group.
My findings surprised me. Because I knew that Hoover families faced economic hardships and that many Hoover parents had had limited access to formal education, I believed that UCI undergraduates would be the first, and possibly only, contact with a university student for some club members. I also expected that there would be significant differences in knowledge about university students between club members and children who didn’t participate in the club.
Instead, I found considerable variation among drawings and text for both club members and non-club members. In each group, some children exhibited knowledge of university life in their drawings and descriptions and some seemed to have little understanding of education beyond their immediate environment at Hoover. I did, however, find a positive correlation between the frequency of interaction with a UCI undergraduate and the likelihood that a club member would identify himself or herself in drawings and descriptions.
When club membership was removed as a variable in analysis, I found that the influence of university undergraduates had reached beyond the target group of club members and had affected children in the general population of the school. Fourth and fifth grade students who participated in the study, whether or not they were members of the Cosmic Dimension, displayed overwhelmingly positive attitudes toward post-secondary education in their drawings and writing.
University students were depicted studying, having friends, helping others, enjoying themselves, using computers, and graduating. The children's drawings made apparent that many of the fourth and fifth graders in this school, both males and females, saw themselves as future college students.
These findings lead me to conclude that university outreach efforts should include programs for children in elementary grades, since this is a crucial time in children’s lives when they are constructing mental schema and building foundations of conceptual understanding.
Nancy Christensen is UC Links evaluator and UCI-CSU joint doctorate articulation coordinator at the University of California, Irvine. Her background includes work in educational television, after-school programs, community volunteerism, and business.
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