Empowering youth: perceptions and use of computers in school-based community development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explored the use, experience, and perceptions of computer technology by senior elementary youth as a tool to support them in a school-based community development (CD) project. Nineteen predominantly female youth, attending a Southwestern Ontario, inner city school participated in a 12-week CD project. Youth used computers to communicate using a computer-mediated-communication (CMC) system, construct a project web site, conduct an online survey to gather peers' opinions about the community, search for resources, and prepare documents. A qualitative instrumental case study method was used. Data collection strategies included participant observation, interviews, focus groups, two online and two paper-based surveys, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of on-line discourse. At the start of the CD process, youth felt that they could "make a difference" in their community and that group action and influential adults could support their voice. They also perceived that they had some decision-making power in their school, but little power in the broader community. This was related to their perception of being low in social hierarchy and mistrusted by adults. Youth perceived that the computer was an empowering tool. They felt that using computers helped reduce their anxiety, increased their control in communicating with adults, raised their social status, increased their participation with the community, and improved access to resources. Web site construction and online surveying were particularly valued. Although important community contacts were made using CMC, few notes were written and read by youth. This was related to computer access issues (insufficient time for computers, lack of computer availability, and technical problems) and a lack of engagement in CMC. Youth perceived that using CMC felt like work and lacked authenticity. Some also had limited computer skills or little interest in computers. In addition, adults' messages were misinterpreted by youth and youth lost some credibility online as a result of their use of fictitious cyber names. The study also revealed factors in the school and in youth's relationships with adults that enabled and constrained the CD process. Overall, results strongly indicate that youth perceived that computers supported their empowerment. Recommendations for practitioners and future research are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".