UB Study Suggests Ways To Improve Elementary Students’ Language-Arts Skills

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- New York State's new English Language Arts Test requires a relatively high level of language proficiency, and thousands of students and teachers across the state are having difficulty achieving the new writing standards required to pass the test.

Working with the students and teachers at Public School 40 in the City of Buffalo, Tim Karda, a doctoral student in educational psychology at the University at Buffalo, may have developed a solution to the difficulty faced by students -- especially at-risk students -- and their teachers.

It involves a combination of directive teaching methods and student use of computers that, in a preliminary study, significantly improved students' writing skills.

In January, Karda completed a writing-improvement project with fourth-grade students at School 40 in preparation for that month's Language Arts Test.

He had used directive and non-directive teaching methods, both with and without computers, to assist the students. Afterwards, he conducted a preliminary study to determine the impact of the various methodologies on student performance on standardized tests.

"At the end of the project," he says, "the students in the experimental group, which employed computer use along with directive teaching methods, achieved significantly higher scores on a standardized language-arts test conducted by me than did their classmates -- on average, 20 percent higher."

Encouraged by those preliminary results, Karda hopes to use the colorful, relatively high-tech Writing Instruction Laboratory he put together at School 40 to conduct further work with Buffalo school students and teachers.

"We only have the results of a pilot project so far," he says, "and although they look very promising, we need to carry out a larger research project to confirm or deny the initial findings.

"We also need to update the laboratory so that it can be used not just to teach students, but to teach Buffalo public-school teachers the successful techniques for teaching children to write well that were developed through this project," said Karda, who is seeking funding for his work.

"An upgraded lab also could be used for an after-school program to help prepare School 40's fourth-graders for the state's January 2001 English Language Arts Test. It could be a state-of-the-art, elementary-level writing research center and a model for schools and corporation interested in improving the writing skills of elementary-school students."

Karda's experimental group was comprised of fourth-graders whose scores on earlier standardized tests were measurably lower than those of their classroom peers.

Two days a week from November through January, Karda taught them to plan and revise their writing with the help of donated computers -- some of them his own -- that he had refurbished and installed in School 40 on his own time.

He used several combinations of teaching methodologies and found that directive teaching -- in which teachers provide direct guidance and guidelines -- in conjunction with use of word processors resulted in a significant increase in test scores by the experimental group on a standardized test he conducted.

Karda has a particular interest in improving the performance of children who face the greatest difficulty achieving the higher language-arts standards.

He points out that when kids don't write well, their grasp of the complexities and beauty of language is severely limited. Written language then is less useful for them as a tool of expressiveness, logical thinking and communication in every field of endeavor, academic and otherwise.

Karda says that these students often are labeled erroneously as academically incompetent, a stigma aggravated by their high levels of frustration, low grades and, ultimately, indifference and "attitude problems" that in their circumstances are understandable. These circumstances put children at very high risk for dropping out of high school.

There are many ways to approach a child's writing deficit and turn it around, some of which have developed from word-processing technology, he says. Not all have been tested against one another in the field, however, and in many school districts, large class size and other issues collude to make controlled studies by the teachers themselves difficult, if not impossible.

"That's where UB's Graduate School of Education can be very helpful. We want to conduct studies to discover the best possible teaching methods with different students in various content areas, and the teachers themselves need this information in order to improve results in the classroom," he says.

"Projects like this, marked by school district-university cooperation, have been very successful in finding innovative solutions to academic problems," Karda says.