T2K Gallery

Time to Know
New York City Project
Student Drawings

As demonstrated throughout past research, student drawings provide a unique and valuable perspective on the impacts of technology as perceived by the students themselves (Bebell, 2007; Russell, Bebell & Higgins, 2004). Although student drawings may be an unusual tool for collecting information about students and their classrooms, student drawings continue to provide a rich descriptive examination into students' perspective that is often neglected in more traditional data sources.

As one component of the Time to Know study, fourth grade students across all of the five program schools and the five matched comparison schools participated in the pre/post student drawings. Using random selection, Time to Know and comparison classrooms were presented with one of two drawing prompts:

Think about your 3^rd grade classroom.
In the space below, draw a picture of yourself learning English in school.

Think about your 3^rd grade classroom.
In the space below, draw a picture of yourself learning Math in school.

During the baseline period (pre-Time to Know; Fall 2010) over 900 drawings were collected from students. For each student drawing, a trained researcher coded a number of dichotomous features that have been pre-selected using an emergent analytic coding process. The coded features formed six broad categories: student characteristics, teacher characteristics, student demeanor, instructional content, technology present, and other characteristics. In addition to these dichotomous codes, each drawing was rated on a scale quantifying the extent each drawing was more teacher-directed or student-centered. (Gulek, 1999)

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