Inducing Theoretically Guided Practice Among Undergraduates
All UClinks activities, by virtue of their core structure, involve undergraduates in the process of educating younger people. This involvement goes far beyond the usual role of observer or teacher’s assistant, because the undergrads play a central role in constructing the activities that they then engage in with the children. They are taught to document their work in professional detail. This arrangement appears to induce a unique form of theory-practice education marked changes in undergraduate’s conceptual grasp of the materials, greater ability to mediate activity at the sites through a theoretical lens as a tool of their own, a marked change in attitude toward economically less fortunate and unfamiliar ethnic groups, and greater focus on their own educational goals in relation to work, are all major topics of study. In the past few years we have been able to document these kinds of changes through a qualitative analysis of undergraduate field notes and special reflection papers that they themselves write on the basis of their field notes Over the past two quarter we have conducted pre and post tests of undergraduate development in these classes based on Q-sort methods that yield a quantitative profile of each undergraduate’s understandings and attitudes toward issues that we know, on the basis of prior analyses, arise routinely in the practicum classes. An immediate goal for this work is to replicate the initial results, in which the quantitative results appear to converge with the qualitative self evaluations arrived at by narrative techniques. If the replication is successful, we will be in a position to conduct a true experiment with pre and post test measures on students attending practicum and non-practicum style classes focused on the same intellectual content. (Researchers: Michael Cole, Deborah Wilson; (for preliminary results see Deborah Wilson's paper on using Qsort to assess attitutde changes in undergraduates who participate in Fifth Dimension projects. For a related paper examining border work in the Fifth Dimension.)