Volume 25 Number 1
October 1985

Rhet Diessner, Edwin E. Rousculp, and Jacqueline L. Walker
Division of Education
Yakima Indian Nation

During the initial year of the grant Yakima Tribal School sought six learning objectives for students: (1) to become familiar with word processing computer equipment; (2) to learn basic keyboarding (minimally fluent typing skills); (3) to acquire mastery of 25 Apple Writer II word processing commands; (4) to increase writing fluency; (5) to increase elaboration during a re-write of a first draft essay; (6) to increase thematic maturity in essays (including an increase in standard logical thought progression). Additionally, the apprehension level students had in regard to writing was investigated, reflecting an interest in whether student apprehension level would increase or decrease during the year.

In order to assess the success of the above-mentioned learning objectives, a pre-experimental, pretest-posttest design (Campbell and Stanley, 1963) was employed.

The participants in the study consisted of all students attending Yakima Tribal School during the 1984-85 school year. Although a total of 86 students were involved in at least some aspect of this instructional study, only 47 were enrolled in school during administrations of both pretests and posttests. There were four students in 7th grade; nine students in 8th grade; thirteen students in 10th grade; five students in 11th grade; and four students in 12th grade. The Yakima Tribal School is a tribally operated, BIA contracted school located in Toppenish, Washington. It is approved by the State of Washington as a private school. Its student body is exclusively Native American with both sexes equally represented (23 females and 24 males) in the study.

The primary pieces of equipment used in the project were components of a word processing station. Each of ten stations included an Apple IIe microcomputer, with an 80 column card; a duodisk drive; an Apple green-screen monitor; and an Apple Writer II diskette (Lutus, 1982). One printer was made available by the grant. MasterType software (Zweig, 1983) was used to teach keyboarding skills.

Four teachers at the Yakima Tribal School were involved in the project. One teacher had responsibility for the 7th and 8th grades; another the 9th grade; and the 10th and 11th grades; and the fourth, the 12th grade. These teachers worked with their respective group of students to attain the learning objectives specified above. The teachers were provided a brief inservice to familiarize them with the "English Fluency Via Computers" project; Apple Writer commands; computer components; the Test of Written Language (TOWL) (Hammill & Larsen, 1983); and MasterType.

As a pretest each student was administered the TOWL. Following the initial hand-written essay, which is part of the TOWL, each student was required to perform a re-write of the essay.

Next, the students were instructed in basic computer terminology and care of the hardware and disks. Following instruction, the students were given a matching quiz to test their familiarity with terms and a diagram of the components, with fill-in-the-blank spaces next to each part. The mastery criteria was 90% of the quiz correctly answered.

Then, for one month, the students were guided through keyboarding with the use of MasterType. It was intended, through 50 minutes of daily use of MasterType, that students would complete lesson 10 (includes learning all letter keys and typing 5 letter words) and type at a rate of 25 words per minute. To assess mastery of this criteria, each instructor recorded the "summary screen" information displayed on the monitor by the MasterType program as each student finished each lesson. The "summary information" provided by the program specified whether the student had attained mastery and should advance to the next lesson, and specified the average words per minute typed by the student.

After the month of keyboarding, writing instruction began. Each instructor used their own techniques for teaching English composition skills. However, the computer was employed for writing by all students, rather than paper and pen. Besides regular English composition, instructors allowed their students to use the word processors for writing assignments that had been given in other classes. This instruction continued throughout the school year.

Integrated with the writing instruction was instruction in Apple Writer II commands. A criterion-referenced check-off list of 25 commonly used word processing commands was kept by each instructor. As a student demonstrated mastery of a command, the instructor marked it off on the list.

The TOWL pretest was again given in January, 1985 to students that had entered Yakima Tribal School after the initial pretest in October, 1984. The essay re-write was also administered. It should be noted that all essay re-writes in this study took place within three days of the first draft.

For the posttest, administered in May, 1985, the students were again given the TOWL, but in a non-standardized manner. Instead of handwriting the essay and rewrite, the students used the word processor with Apple Writer II. As an internal control, a handwritten essay and re-write were assigned the week following the TOWL posttest. Three sequential stimulus pictures were used which were similar to the format in the TOWL, but with different content. To examine significant differences between means on the TOWL pretest-posttest comparisons, t-tests for matched pairs were employed.

Additionally, 16 students who comprised a subset of the total 47 involved in the study took a writing apprehension questionnaire in October and May. Authorship of the questionnaire was unknown, and the actual relationship between response to the questionnaire and true apprehension concerning writing has not been, to our knowledge, established. However, those involved with the study believe that it has strong content validity. The questionnaire consisted of 20 questions (such as "I avoid writing."; "I have no fear of my writing being evaluated"; "I'm nervous about writing"; "I have no fear of my writing being evaluated"; "I'm nervous about writing"; "People seem to enjoy what I write;" that were rated by the student on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Total scores for each student were averaged and the pre-post means were subjected to t-tests to examine significant differences.

Table 1
Mastery of 25 Apple Writer Ile Commands by Grade Level
at Yakima Tribal School: Medians and Ranges

Basic keyboarding. Approximately 20% of the students were able to reach the objective of typing 25 words per minute. All instructors reported that at least 80% of their students were touch-typing, and over 90% appeared comfortable at the keyboard.

Apple Writer II Commands. Table 1 provided summary data for word processing commands mastered by students. The 7th grade median was 14.17 commands, with a range of 14-15; the 8th grade median was 12 commands, with a range of 7-23; the 9th grade median was 24.65 commands, with a range of 6-25; the 10th grade median was 18 commands, with a range of 7-24; the 11th grade median was 19 commands, with a range of 7-22; the 12th grade median was 20 commands, with a range of 15-25.

Writing Fluency. The degree to which writing fluency was increased was judged by examining two sets of data. The first set was from the students (N = 26) who took the TOWL in October and May; the second set was from the students (N = 21) who took the TOWL in January and May. As a single set, they could be described as 47 students with a minimum of 4 months experience with word processing and a maximum of 7 months of experience. Fluency was evaluated by comparing the raw number of words handwritten in the initial TOWL essay with the raw number of words written using the word processor in the TOWL posttest essay. Table 2 summarizes data for the two distinct groups identified above. Combined data for the two groups are also presented in Table 2.

There were significant differences in fluency between pretests and posttests of both groups. In the N = 26 group, the handwritten average was 136 words (s.d. = 62.2), whereas the word processed average was 210 words (s.d. = 117.4). They correlated at .336(25) and the p = .004. With the N = 21 group, the handwritten average was 109 words (s.d. = 48.6), whereas the word processed average was 187 words (s.d. = 105). The correlation between them was .43(20), and the p = .002.

As a single N = 47 group, the pretest average was 124 words (s.d. 58.2); the posttest average was 197 words (s.d. = 114.6); r (46) = .384; p .001. This is an average increase of fluency by 73 words; a 51% increase.

Table 2

Fluency Means, Standard Deviations, and Correlations in Handwritten
and Word Processed Essays for Yakima Indian Students

As an internal control, for changes over time between the handwritten versus word processed re-writes, the students were required to handwrite and re-write an essay based on three sequentially related stimulus pictures (judged by the project staff to be similar to the stimulus pictures used for essays in the TOWL), the week after they took the TOWL word processed posttest. All but two students refused to perform a handwritten re-write of this essay. Therefore a statistical comparison could not be made.

Thematic Maturity. The conceptual quality of the essays was judged through use of the Thematic Maturity subtest of the TOWL. The N = 47 group of students that had 4-7 months of experience with word processing had a mean raw score average of 5.64, s.d. = 2.94, on this subtest. The mean raw score average for the Thematic Maturity posttest was 5.85, s.d. = 2.53. The Pearson product-moment correlation, r (46) = .669, p = .53 indicates a nonsignificant difference between means.

Writing Apprehension. The average raw score on the writing apprehension questionnaire in the Fall was 53.5, s.d. = 9.3; the Spring mean was 57.9, s.d. = 12.9. The r (15) = 0. 472; p = 0.162. Although the trend here was toward greater apprehension (the higher the raw score, the greater the implied apprehension, it was not statistically significant).

It must be pointed out that, unfortunately, like much educational research, this study did not employ a true experimental design, but rather a simple pretest-posttest pre-experimental design, with no control group. Due to ethical and practical considerations, randomization was not possible. However, much like the assessment of instructional objectives, or use of standardized group achievement tests, demonstration of progress provides face validity for teachers and administrators, even if one can't point the finger of proof at a particular causative factor.

All students fairly easily became familiar with the computers, and most students and instructors were pleased with the MasterType lessons and format. Although not all the students reached the objective of 25 words per minute, most did advance from single finger, to touch-typing.

Not all students reached the objective of Mastering 25 Apple Writer II commands, in fact most did not. However, there was great variation in the amount of interest that students showed in wanting to learn more than the few basic commands that allowed them to load and save their essays. There also was a large degree of variation in the emphasis that the four instructors placed upon mastering the 25 commands. There was general consensus that Apple Writer II commands are easy to learn (even the junior high students had no trouble using it), but powerful enough to satisfy the instructors' "after school" use of them for making up tests, writing reports and letters, and organizing instructional related information.

Since the major point of this project was to increase the written English fluency of the students, the staff was very pleased with the significant increases in quantity of writing produced by the students when using the word processors. With the combined N = 47 group, the average increase was 51 % more words. A point of interest: Heritage College (whose student population is 30% Native American) had 20 students in their introductory composition classes, using Apple IIe word processors, and involved in a similar fluency study. Their students' handwritten pretest mean average was 146 words (s.d. = 89.2) and posttest average was 257 words (s.d. = 109.8). The r (19) = .176; p = .002; positive results similar to Yakima Tribal Schools. Other studies have found the word processor to be a great enhancement to the revision process for college students (Bean, 1983; Collier, 1983).

The data indicated Yakima Tribal School students had impressive elaboration increases during re-writes; from a loss of 46 words with handwriting, to a gain of 33 words with word processing, providing strong face validity for the use of word processors for generating compositions with junior and senior high school Indian students. Similar to these findings, other researchers have found that junior high students get involved in writing more and find revising easier with word processors (Kane, 1983); and that high school students quickly see the value in word processing for re-writing and generating ideas (Mittricker, 1983).

One major problem did occur in regard to handwriting. Students became more and more reluctant to do handwritten work, and would procrastinate on assignments, stating that they wished to wait until their computer class hour to work on papers for other subject area classes, such as science or history. This was epitomized when all but two students refused to write a re-write on the handwritten essay assignment in May, that followed a week after the word processing posttest. Although, as Larsen (1984) has stated, on-screen writing can be a powerful draw into the composing and revising process; it appears that it is a powerful draw to on-screen writing, but possibly a repulsion from handwritten composition. The implications of this trend for students, primarily from low socio-economic backgrounds, who may transfer to other schools or go on to colleges that do not offer free access to computers should be investigated.

Staff members stated that students were more concerned with spelling and punctuating correctly when using the word processors, and would frequently make use of dictionaries or ask the teacher for guidance. This contrasted sharply with their attitude during handwritten assignments. In addition, students would often ask for printouts of their work to take home and share with parents and friends. The Tribal School staff plans on taking advantage of this interest and pride to work toward eliminating English usage errors through the use of recently purchased software designed for that purpose.

Unfortunately there did not appear to be a significant increase in thematic maturity during the school year, at least as demonstrated by the Thematic Maturity scale of the TOWL. The school year following this study, the Yakima Tribal School plans to address this point directly by using word processing techniques to teach strategies of cause and effect, contrast and comparison, and using specifics to support generalizations.

The N was particularly small in regard to examining writing apprehension, and the school plans to evaluate that again, in the upcoming school year. Although no change was noted in the mean averages of the 16 students assessed, there was the strong difference between the freshmen class and the sophomore/junior group. The head English teacher at Yakima Tribal School feels this may have been because of different English instruction techniques; the freshman instructor emphasized grammar drill, whereas the sophomore/junior instructor emphasized a holistic, paragraph-producing technique. This is obviously speculative, but does appear to have face validity, and may be investigated further during the next project year.

Just as computer assisted instruction has been shown to improve reading and math achievement for Indian students (Indian Affiliates, Inc., 1983); this project has provided evidence that word processing with computers can improve Indian students' writing output. Overall consensus among teachers and administrators was that the Yakima Tribal School program was greatly enhanced due to the presence of the 10 word processing stations.

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