A comparison of the teacher-directed approach versus the learning center approach in creative writing in the third grade

The purpose of this study was to determine whether children at the third grade level respond more creatively when they are involved in a learning center environment with a wide variety of choices of writing topics or when they are assigned a particular topic for writing as a whole-class assignment.

Two third grade classrooms were divided randomly into two equal groups. One group was given a specific assignment as a whole class and the other group did activities and writing assignments in learning centers, where each member was permitted to determine his own choice of task from those available. Four centers and four thematically corresponding writing topics were used. Materials were designed by the researcher and both treatments were conducted by the researcher.

A panel of three professional educators acted as judges to determine which group responded more quantitatively and qualitatively in their writing. Judges-rated stories with the Carlson Analytical Scale for Measuring the Originality of Children's Stories.

The results indicated that subjects in the teacher-directed group quantitatively produced more writing than those in the learning center group. It was also found that pieces of writing produced in the teacher directed treatment group were more creative than those produced by the learning center sample when rated by judges using the Carlson Analytical Scale for Measuring the Originality of Children's Stories.

The conclusions of this study indicated that children in the teacher-directed group may have written more because trey did not lose time deciding what to write about, children in the teacher-directed group produced more writing because they had a specific requirement to do so, children in the teacher-directed group wrote more and better writing because they were instructed in the approach to which the children were most accustomed, and the subjects in the teacher-directed group were found to have written more creatively than subjects in the learning center group when the stories were rated by judges using the Carlson Analytical Scale for Measuring the Originality of Children's Stories.

The researcher made the following recommendations for further study:

1. Study should be done comparing the same two instructional approaches using professionally designed learning center materials.

2. Study should be done at other grade levels.

3. Study should be done over a longer period of time which would begin much earlier in the school year.

4. Study should be made comparing the writing of students in classrooms commonly using the learning center approach in all subjects with those classrooms which exclusively use the teacher-directed approach.

5. Study should be done in other living environments to determine whether residential environment plays a role in the amount of structure in which a child expresses creativity.