The Fifth Dimension: An After-School Program Built on Diversity

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 The Quantitative Effects of Fifth Dimension Participation on Children’s Cognitive and Academic Skills Fifth Dimension site in operation creates a strong impression that good things are happening and that children are learning. Children and their undergraduate partners chatter away, problems get solved, and reading and writing abound. However, more than good impressions are needed to provide convincing evidence that the program is effective and deserving of continued support. Despite consistent claims for some time now that educational technology is a powerful tool to further learning, researchers have not found corresponding evidence that exposure to computer-based learning environments is sufficient to produce positive academic consequences (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt 1996; Cuban 1986; Mayer 1988, 1999). The evidence concerning the efficacy of after-school programs is similarly contentious (Eccles and Gootman 2002; Vandell, Pierce, and Dadisman 2005). In undertaking to establish Fifth Dimension sites, both university and community partners have been aware of the need to determine how children ’s experience in a Fifth Dimension setting that emphasizes the use of computers might enhance their literacy, mathematical, and problem-solving skills. Since after-school programs are widely viewed as places that can support the goals of schooling, research teams in all of the Fifth Dimension sites have accepted the need for evaluation research to study the effects of this computer-based educational activity on children’s cognition. This chapter describes our attempts at systematic quantitative evaluation of the changes wrought by Fifth Dimension participation on the cognitive and academic skills of the child participants. Our major focus is on experimental and quasi-experimental studies that were carried out across the participating Fifth Dimension sites, but we also include some data from cases where pre- and post-test measures could be obtained but no plausible control groups could be assembled. The analyses reported here A are limited to the study of effects in interactional circumstances where the children could be understood to be carrying out the tasks on their own, in contrast to the generally collaborative nature of Fifth Dimension activities . But the outcome measures in these studies do not allow us to separate out the effects of different components of the Fifth Dimension environment —for example, the impact of exposure to the games themselves versus the importance of undergraduate-child relationships as the primary causal factor involved in performance changes. Thus, although our focus is on computer-mediated learning, the outcomes documented in these studies are best attributable to the combined effects of the various aspects of the Fifth Dimension environment. We cannot claim that playing educational computer games necessarily has the same positive effects in other environments. As discussed in chapter 4, research teams at the different Fifth Dimension sites made use of different research traditions to study the processes at work in Fifth Dimension activities, including those that allow for quantitative comparisons as well as those that emphasize qualitative speci fications (Mayer et al. 1997; Schustack 1997). These different research traditions differ not only in their data collection methods but also in the rhetorical conventions they use to report findings. Descriptions of studies reported in this chapter adhere to the introduction-methods-participantsresults -discussion style, a format appropriate for reporting experimental research. All of the studies described here have been published elsewhere; references to these publications are provided throughout the chapter for those readers who want fuller detail on specific studies. The goal of this chapter is not to report the specifics of each study but rather to highlight the strategies that research teams developed for conducting quantitative studies in the Fifth Dimension considered as in situ laboratories for studying cognitive development. STUDIES WITH EXPERIMENTAL OR QUASIEXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS The results for quantitative studies where it proved possible to arrange for some level of experimental control can be grouped in several different ways, since each study investigated a skill or domain that is itself complex and relevant to multiple categories. The studies are grouped here by the domain or skill that was the investigative focus: computer mastery, mathematical understanding and problem-solving, and reading, writing, and grammar skills. We also describe the status of each study in terms of other dimensions of comparison, such as near versus far transfer, the amount of Fifth Dimension experience of the “treatment group” (in months or number of visits), similarity to school-based tasks, and the test-taking environTHE FIFTH DIMENSION 86 ment...