Fifty four five-year-old children in three London Primary Schools were tested using the British Ability Scales (NFER). Every 'product' of the children's construction work for the term was photographed. Three intervention groups were withdrawn from their classroom for one hour per week for focused instruction. 'Access only' groups were also withdrawn but were not provided with instruction. The children in the second control group received no additional experience of making beyond that normally provided in the classroom. A total of 450 products were constructed by the children during the intervention phase and each has been categorised from an analysis of the photographs and according to principles of structures and mechanisms. The evidence suggests that while the intervention group constructions became increasingly complex, the performance of the 'access only' group actually deteriorated in terms of both quantity and quality. No significant improvement in BAS scores between the pre-test and post-test was found yet the evidence did suggest that learning had taken place, and that children in the intervention groups produced more elaborate constructions than any of those in the control groups

Iram Siraj-Blatchford (7151468)

John Siraj-Blatchford (7150883)

English

Loughborough University Institutional Repository

   This item was submitted to Loughborough’s Institutional Repository by the author and is made available under the following Creative Commons Licence conditions.      For the full text of this licence, please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/  32Siraj-Blatchford 1.6IDATER 98  Loughborough UniversityLearning through making in the early yearsJohn Siraj-Blatchford* and Iram Siraj-Blatchford+School of Education, University of Durham*, Institute of Education, University of London+AbstractFifty four five-year-old children in three London Primary Schools were tested using the BritishAbility Scales.  Every ‘product’ of the children’s construction work for the term was photographed.Three intervention groups were withdrawn from their classroom for one hour per week forfocused instruction.  ‘Access only’ groups were also withdrawn but were not provided withinstruction.  The children in the second control group received no additional experience ofmaking beyond that normally provided in the classroom.  A total of 450 products wereconstructed by the children during the intervention phase and each has been categorised froman analysis of the photographs and according to principles of structures and mechanisms.The evidence suggests that while the intervention group constructions became increasinglycomplex, the performance of the ‘access only’ group actually deteriorated in terms of bothquantity and quality.  No significant  improvement in BAS scores between the pre-test andpost-test was found yet the evidence did suggest that learning had taken place, and that childrenin the intervention groups produced more elaborate constructions than any of those in thecontrol groups.The benefits of ‘Learning through Making’ hasbeen accepted since the inception of thekindergarten movement.  Comenius,Pestalozzi and Froebel all extolled the virtuesof industry and encouraged educators toprovide opportunities for children to makethings.  Froebel’s proposals for theVolkserziehungsonstalt at Helba in 1829included the suggestion that children shouldspend each afternoon in crafts that includedthe making of wooden kitchen utensils,weaving, the use of pasteboard to make stars,wheels, boxes, napkin rings and lampshades.He also suggested that children might beencouraged to whittle boats, windmills andwaterwheels, model with clay and flexible wire.For Froebel, education in manual skills servedto develop the whole child, it was much morethan merely a vocational concern.  Froebelbelieved that craft provided a means ofexpression, and also a powerful means todevelop habits of  success, and a sense ofpower and mastery.  The Esmée FairbairnTrust  provided us with the funding to testthese assumptions.Design and technology education is an areaof the National Curriculum that remains underresourced and only partially applied in mostearly infant classrooms; a curriculum‘intervention’ was therefore prepared.  Theresearch model adopted was designed toprovide a programme evaluation.  Bothquantitative and qualitative methods wereemployed and the use of construction kits wasagreed as the central focus with each of theschools involved.  It was felt that constructionkits offered a more ‘clinical’ and easilycontrolled context for the study of makingthan other media and that given theirwidespread use in infant classrooms (andhomes) the findings might be more easilyapplied.  Lego (UK) Ltd. supported the projectby donating three DACTA™  kits to be used inthe schools throughout the study.Children from three classrooms in two Londonschools were tested using the British AbilityScales (BAS).  The schools were selected tooffer broadly typical and similar early yearspractice.  The Block Building Scale was appliedto measure the children’s capability in copyinga design with wooden blocks.  Performanceof this scale requires motor skills and visual-perceptual encoding.  The Picture SimilaritiesScale was also applied to give an indication ofnon-verbal reasoning.  Here the children wererequired to recognise a relationship based onsome common concept or element that wasshared between pictures selected from aseries.  The Matrices Scale provided anadditional non-verbal measure of the33Siraj-Blatchford 1.6IDATER 98  Loughborough Universitychildren’s fluid reasoning ability.  Scalesproviding data on the children’s NamingVocabulary and Digit Recall were also appliedto complete the profile and provide aComposite Ability Score (CAS) that was usedin the initial grouping process.The children were assigned to threeequivalent ability groups of six in each class.A total of 18 children (one group in each ofthree classes) were thus placed in theintervention group, another 18 children weregiven ‘access only’ to the materials andanother 18 made up a second control groupwho were denied access to the materialsduring the study period.  The ‘access only’group was formed in an effort to match themost common practices identified in previousresearch.  Brown (1990) has referred to thiscommon practice where the constructionmaterials are ‘seen principally as toys for thechildren to use in undirected play’.  In Brown’sstudy teachers were often unaware of the factthat children who were expected to beparticipating in this undirected play often leftthe task and chose a different activity entirely:“In an extreme case a pupil regularlyopting to read or draw at this time mighthave had no engagement with them [theconstruction kits] at all” (Brown, 1990:35)At the end of the intervention phase the BASwas conducted a second time to provide post-test data.  Interviews were also conductedduring the study and repertory grids compiledto provide a profile of the intervention andaccess group children’s current knowledgeand understandings of a selection ofappropriate construction components (Siraj-Blatchford, 1995).  Every ‘product’ of thechildren’s construction work for the term wasphotographed and parents were alsointerviewed to identify the extent of thechildren’s related work carried out at home.The intervention groupsEach  intervention group was withdrawn fromtheir classroom for one hour per week andfor this period ‘making things’ was given thesame sort of priority normally given to theliteracy and numeracy curriculum.  Whenchildren are taught to read we normally readto them - we therefore (at times) ‘made’ thingsfor (and with) individuals in the interventiongroup.  When we prioritise reading wenormally hear the children read individually -so we systematically monitored the children’smaking and intervened when necessary tosupport them.  In the teaching of reading wenormally break down words and   teachphonics - and in the same way we broke downvarious constructions and showed thechildren how they were made up fromdifferent mechanisms and structures.  Wediscussed with the children their plans formaking, and carefully matched supportingmaterials to their needs, they were givenconstant encouragement and everycompleted construction was praised andphotographed for analysis.  From week fivethe children were encouraged to drawpictures of what they intended to make beforeembarking upon the construction.The ‘access only’ groupsDuring the first session the children wereinvited to look carefully at the bricks andcomponents available in the DACTA™ box.They discussed the things that could be madewith the Lego.  They were given a free choiceof what to make and it was explained that aphotographic record of all their constructionswould be kept.  As soon as they madesomething they were encourage to continueand make something new.  If they lost interestthey were allowed to return to their classroom.In subsequent sessions the bricks were simplytipped out onto the floor and the childreninvited to make anything they wanted.  Nohelp was offered and the researcher tried tolook busy making notes to avoid them askingfor any.  Help was therefore given only whendirectly asked for and where it would havebeen unfair not to do so.  Often rather thanproviding direct assistance when requested,the children were directed to watch others.As soon as they were available the childrenwere shown their photos individually butthese were never shown to the whole group.During session seven, to keep  the children’sinterest in one group it was necessary tointroduce a theme which individuals couldcontribute to.  They chose a town theme andworked together to make various things.  Atthis stage, in all of the groups there were some34Siraj-Blatchford 1.6IDATER 98  Loughborough Universitychildren who were making no progress andthey were beginning to get bored.  By the endof this phase most of the children in the‘access only’ groups were making little visibleprogress in their construction work.The second control groupsThe children in the second control groupreceived no additional experience of makingbeyond that normally provided in theclassroom.  Any related constructional (e.g.modelling with ‘recycled’ materials) wereconducted at times when the other groupswere able to share the same experience.In the final phase of the research all of thepupils were interviewed and tested with theBAS again and their repertory grids were alsocompiled for a second time.  Apart fromidentifying a great deal of data concerning thespecific benefits to be gained from makingactivities in the early years a broad range ofearly evaluative constructs are also beingidentified.  These may be of particular valueto other research projects concerned with thedesign and technology education of girls andother underachieving groups.  It is envisagedthat this data will be analysed further over thecoming months and that this data will beincluded in the final research report.Contamination and confoundsAs far as could be assessed minimalcontamination was caused by the children ofdifferent groups working together in relevantconstructional contexts.  The parents of eachchild in the intervention group wasquestioned to identify any school friends thatthey might have been playing with afterschool.  The project groupings were onlyapplied for the purposes of the study and wetherefore feel confident that there were noconsistent differences in the treatment of thechildren in the different groups apart from thatdefined in the intervention above.AttritionAttrition was minimal, where one child left agroup at an early stage it proved possible tosubstitute an alternative but equivalent childfrom the same class.  Where children wereabsent from a particular session this has beenrecorded and allowed for in the calculation ofstatistics.The findingsDuring the ten weeks of the interventionphase a total of 450 products were constructedby the children.  The children’s products wereplaced in a series of categories that weredeveloped from an analysis of thephotographs (Brown, 1990).  Thiscategorisation was also informed by an analysisof the guidance currently available to teachersconcerned with teaching principles ofstructures and mechanisms.  In this paper onlyD and F categories will be discussed.  Dcategories relate to structures andenvironments, F categories to mechanism andmoving parts.  D1s and F1s represent verysimple constructions while D8s  and F8s morecomplex.  It should be noted that it provedimpossible to photograph every singleindividual construction, a few were brokenwhile they were being played with and otherswere altered several times during sessions.  Itwas also difficult  to make generalisationsabout the capabilities of some individualchildren from the categories alone.  Child 45,for example, produced very few F categoriescompared to D’s.  This was not because shewas incapable of using moving parts, it wassimply because she had a preference forconstructing models involving people andintricate gardens and most of our efforts toencourage mechanisms failed.  When she wasasked in session 9 to make something differentshe easily made a truck.  By contrast, child 25clearly produced very few F’s because shefound it particularly difficult and on the oneoccasion she did produce a model withmoving parts (an F4) it is likely that shereceived some assistance from another child.After week seven the intervention group weresometimes discouraged from using movingparts by the particular design problems set.The situation up to that point suggests thatwhile the intervention groups constructionswere becoming increasingly complex, theperformance of the ‘access only’ group wasactually deteriorating in terms of both quantityand quality.  This suggests that the teacher’s35Siraj-Blatchford 1.6IDATER 98  Loughborough UniversityScale Pre-test Post-testChi-Square Significance Chi-Square SignificanceBlock Design 0.01 0.99 0.63 0.73Picture Sim’ 0.24 0.89 0.07 0.97Matricies 2.06 0.36 2.22 0.33Vocabulary 0.03 0.98 0.89 0.64Digit Recall 1.28 0.53 0.40 0.82CAS 0.34 0.98 0.37 0.83(Kruskal-Wallis One-way ANOVA)Table 1Chi-Square SignificanceBlock Design 1.89 0.39Picture Similarity 0.65 0.72Matricies 0.02 1.00Vocabulary 2.67 0.26Digit Recall 1.39 0.50CAS 1.24 0.54(Kruskal-Wallis One-way ANOVA)Table 2role in encouraging learning is crucial and thatthe practice of simply relying on access to thematerials and ‘discovery’ may actually becounterproductive.Interestingly, early analysis of the photographsalso suggests that no correlation is to be foundbetween the product categories and any of theBAS sub-test scores.  But correlations werefound between these categories and gender.Both the complexity (Sig. .0018) and quantity(Sig. .0006) of F categories (mechanisms)produced were strongly correlated with‘Boys’.  The quantity of D categories(environments) produced were alsocorrelated strongly with ‘Girls’ (Sig. .0018)(Mann-Whitney).  The above Table 1 providesan indication of the difference between groupsin terms of BAS pre-test and post-testperformanceAs can be seen the groups were constructedto show no significant differences in scores atPretest.  The Table also shows that the groupsremained equivalent and the samples werewell controlled.When we looked for possible changes in eachgroup’s performance between pretest andposttest the statistics shown in Table 2 wereobtained.We thus found that there were no significantimprovements in scores between the pretestand posttest.  On the face of it, this  suggests ageneral lack of progress and improvement inability despite the tuition.  More realisticallythree interpretative possibilities should beconsidered:1 That neither the intervention and/or theaccess to materials had any significantcognitive effect upon the children.2 That the intervention did improve thechildren’s performance but that the BASwas insensitive to the specific capabilitiesthat were developed.3 That the results were compromised bysome unknown errors or effects.While the latter possibility may only besatisfactorily dismissed following replication,the photographs and the personal construct36Siraj-Blatchford 1.6IDATER 98  Loughborough Universityinterviews do provide a basis for making ajudgement regarding possibility 1) and 2).The identification of improvements indesign and problem solving capabilityEarly analysis of the evidence does suggest thatsome learning has taken place, that childrenin the intervention group produced moreelaborate constructions than any of those inthe control groups.  This is reflected in theanalysis of the categories and in qualitativeterms.  It was the intervention group alonethat elaborated their constructions with otherfound materials and it was only in theintervention group that some of the childrenused integral chassis in their vehicles.Improvements in perseverance and qualityThe total number of bricks used in eachconstruction was recorded although thenumber of bricks employed should not betaken to indicate relative complexity.  Oftenchildren were seen to construct more intricatedesigns using fewer bricks.  That said, the datadid provide a crude indication of the amountof work involved in construction and mighttherefore be taken as an indicator ofperseverance in making.  But again there is adanger of reading too much into this.  Forexample, child 1 was generally moreproductive than child 47 and this may well bean indication of his demotivation in the faceof the difficulties he experienced in realisinghis designs - but it might equally have beenthe result of his greater inclination to engagein fantasy play with the things that he didmake.  This inevitably left him with lessconstruction time.We have gained some evidence to suggest thatDweck and Leggett (1988) are correct inassociating performance goals (as opposed tolearning goals) with learned helplessness andlow self-esteem.  This is particularly relevantto pupil self-concepts in key subject areas suchas mathematics, science and design andtechnology.  Careful scaffolding may thus beconsidered crucial.References• Brown, C. (1990) ‘Girls, boys andtechnology’. School science review, June,71.• Dweck, C. and Leggett (1988) ‘A socialcognitive approach to motivation andpersonality’. Psychological review, 95, 2.• Siraj-Blatchford, J. (1995) ‘Kelly’s repertorygrid: a technique for developing evaluationin design and technology’. In Smith, J.S.(ed) IDATER 95,  Department of Designand Technology, Loughborough Universityof Technology.

Learning through making in the early years

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Learning through making in the early years

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