The basic idea of this methodology is to make the reporting of anecdotes more explicit and to treat the anecdote as data. While this is an unusual approach, we feel that it captures the essence of what has been done by the children who have worked on projects over the past three years in three different middle schools. Most of the stories are about children from a middle school that is located in a small city in the southeast that is largely influenced by a university in that town. There are two stories that come from two different large inner city middle schools. Two of the authors of this paper wrote two of the stories and each of the other authors wrote one. The authors wrote their stories as masters or doctoral students, a teacher, or a professor. 
 

Participants

The stories in this paper were written about children that were in either an advanced seventh grade language arts class, a special needs class for children with behavior/emotional disorders, or an at-risk language arts class from a university influenced small city (population 80,000). This school is interesting in that it has an inordinately large gifted population (20 percent) while it also has a large poor at-risk population (over 50 percent qualify for meal assistance). 

In addition, two of the stories were about children in a regular language arts class at two inner-city schools. The population of each of these schools was nearly 100 percent African-American and more importantly, 100 percent poor. 

Materials

At the small city school, we had several different configurations. In one setting we had two computers in the back of an advanced language arts classroom. In another, there were five computers in the back of the room (the following year). In another, there were six computers in a separate classroom (mini-lab). Finally, there were two computers in a separate classroom. The computers were mostly configured the same as above (with the addition of a couple of Macintosh computers in one setting). In the mini-lab, we also added HyperStudio in the last year of the project. 

Besides the computer setups, we also created a set of "cheat sheets" to help students develop their multimedia documents. No large class instruction on how to use the computers was provided. The students learned as they went about creating their documents. A set of planning sheets were provided at the beginning of the project and participants were not permitted to begin their projects until their plans were clearly articulated as judged by their teacher or assistant. 
 

Procedure

We asked all students to write on a sheet of paper their perceived knowledge and experience with computers and camcorders. Additionally, we asked them to specify with whom they might like to work. From this data, we were able to select groups of two and three students. We went back to the classes with these groupings and asked each group to work together to write a proposal describing their intended project, the only constraint being that it be "appropriate" for the classroom. From these proposals, we selected the first groups to participate. This selection was based somewhat on the teacher's perceived judgment of the students' ability. We hypothesized that the higher ability students were likely to be successful, and their documents could then be used as models for later groups. In order to be equitable, all students in each of the two classes participated at some point in the study. 

On the first day of the marking period, we asked the participants to complete the pre-testing or post-testing (depending on whether they were starting or finishing). This took approximately one hour. We then spent the rest of the week helping the students to plan their projects. The last five weeks of the marking period were spent in completing the project. The researchers tended to be more available towards the beginning of the project and less towards the end. We averaged about one day per week. Our visits served two purposes: to assist the students and to make observations of them as they completed their projects. 

 Analysis

The qualitative data was analyzed in terms of Schank's idea of stories. Because he believes that the story is the fundamental unit of memory that is of most interest, we decided that the story would be our unit of analysis in this study. We found that early on, when asked about the project by friends and colleagues, we tended to tell stories about the participants in an attempt to characterize the learning experiences of this approach. We have chosen to make this the formalism for our analysis. Therefore, we will include a set of stories about the individual groups to demonstrate what went on during this experiment and provide conclusions based on these stories at the end.
 

There are eight authors and ten stories that constitute the data for this study. Two of the current authors wrote two of the stories each (Orey and Fan). The remaining six stories were told by the other six authors. These authors are or were either doctoral students who were assigned to work at the middle school (Hogle), doctoral students who volunteered to work at the middle school (Thuma and Tzeng), or masters students who volunteered to work at the middle school (Robertshaw and Scott). In addition, one story was written by the seventh grade advanced language arts teacher from the small city school (Crenshaw).  You can link to each of the stories below. 

Story One: The Beatles Project  - This story describes how five children working very well together, created a large scale and successful multimedia document.

Story Three: The Video Games Project - This story details how a not very popular student worked in a group. 

Story Four: The Dark Boyfriend - This story describes a very interesting group who were able to restructure their entire project as a result of their misunderstanding of the technology. 

Story Five: Mrs. Iyoshi - This story describes a much less open-ended approach to projects. 

Story Six: The Colors Project - This story describes how technology problems interfere in the process and how a project can be more organic than planned. 

Story Seven: Travius - This story describes the process of a project for an at-risk student. 

Story Eight: Olympics - This story describes a partnership that did not work very well. 

Story Nine: The Washington Story - This story describes a successful implementation of our project-based approach in an inner-city school. 

Story Ten: The Carver Story - This story describes a failure in our implementation. 
 

Because we have conducted a series of studies using the same project-based approach, we will present observational data from the study in the context of this literature review. In this way, we can fully describe the treatment and review the literature at the same time. Again, we are using Turner and Paris's six C's of motivation to describe the project. 

Choice. Choices seem to be a focus of our efforts. First, we allow the children to have complete choice in a topic for their multimedia project. We try to help support this decision by suggesting that their choice might fall into the category of research, opinion or narrative. These three categories can loosely define the diverse topics chosen by the children that participate in the projects. In addition to the choice of topic, we allow the children to choose the development tool they use for their project. The choice was between HyperStudio (which in the Windows version with our current computer setup allowed the students to use sounds, photos, graphics and links) or ClarisWorks (which would allow the students to include sounds, video, photos, and graphics). As a prelude to the C for consequences, we informed the children that we would convert ClarisWorks documents to HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and put their documents on the World Wide Web. The HyperStudio projects would be placed on a CD-ROM and stored forever in the media center. As a consequence of this choice, we also told the students that none of the material in a ClarisWorks document could be copyrighted material, whereas, the HyperStudio documents could include copyrighted material that was owned by the school (since it would not be seen outside of the school). 

Another choice that the students could make was which planning method to use. We gave them a choice between creating a web of ideas, a cluster of main topic/supporting ideas/details, or a traditional outline. However, we required that they complete one of these. We found in previous research that structuring the planning process was necessary because of the students' lack of planning knowledge and because it facilitated later collaboration. We also required that they define goals, audience and conclusions as part of the planning process. In addition to these choices, there were myriad choices throughout the project with regard to layout, color choice, image choice, font choice, etc. Choice was a key attribute to the project-based approach that we followed. 

Challenge. The second C is challenge. Like the story "The Three Bears", the key to challenge is to have the level of challenge "be just right." Because of all the choice that was available to the children, challenge was a key issue in topic selection and planning. If the topic were too easy, the children would not be able to remain interested in the topic for six weeks. Guidance was provided in helping the children choose a topic and project that would provide just the right amount of challenge to the children. We tried to minimize the challenge associated with the technology by having a set of "Cheat Sheets" available to help children "capture" photographs, video and audio (Fan, 1996). Another aspect of challenge is the fact that we give the children six weeks to work on their projects. While some people in the school expressed an interest in these projects, the fact that they only gave their children a week or two to work on the project really minimized the challenge in the project. 

Control. The third C is control. This seems to overlap with "choice." Because the students had control over topic selection and project implementation, they also had control over these parts of the project. Because we "required" the students to plan their projects, this part of the project always seems to be the least motivating phase. Perhaps this result is because the students do not have control over this choice. However, in working with seventh graders in this middle school for two years, we have found that without the planning phase projects are not as good and cooperation seems to be hindered. The balance between teacher and student control is a very important one in our projects. In a traditional teaching approach, teacher control predominates. With the project-based approach, student control predominates. We have used teacher control to eliminate "inappropriate" topics, to require planning, and to maintain appropriate behavior in the classroom (generally, behaviors seem to be louder, though these behaviors are usually the result of enthusiasm toward the project). 
 
 

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