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Teaching With SAKAI Innovation Award “Juvenile Justice” - Wiki Project

Dr. Scott BowmanAssistant Professor – Criminal JusticeTexas State University – San Marcos

June 16, 2010

Teaching With SAKAI Innovation Award

211th Sakai Conference - June 15-17, 2010

Thank You’s…



• This project was created out of the Texas StateUniversity 2009 Summer Technology Integration Workshop.

• Workshop focus was placed on course CJ3300 (Juvenile Justice).

• Technology Integration – WIKI system in TRACS.



There are 3 challenging student misconceptions in CJ3300:

1. Free will v. Positivistic Influences

2. Circumstantial v. historiographic and/or multigenerational

3. Separate, specific action v. Larger Social Function

(us v. them)



2 Goals…

a. Promote a more accurate understanding of the factors that increase the likelihood of a juvenile entering the juvenile justice system.

b. Examine the pragmatic difficulties that juveniles (and their families) face when attempting to offset these factors

There are 3 challenging student misconceptions in CJ3300:

1. Free will v. Positivistic Influences

2. Circumstantial v. historiographic and/or multigenerational

3. Separate, specific action v. Larger Social Function



• On the second day of the course, students were asked the question “what are the variables that might increase the likelihood of a juvenile entering the juvenile justice system.”

• Students provided approximately 75 different variables that were structured and placed into the categories: “family”, “socioeconomic structure”, “neighborhood”, “schools”, and “gangs.”

• Students were then randomly assigned zip codes and one of the aforementioned “difficulty variables” to determine practical challenges for a juvenile in that city, as well as an overall likelihood of their entering into the juvenile justice system based on the city structure.



• For several textbook chapters throughout the semester, students were assigned accompanying WIKI assignments.

• Each assignment called upon them to gather (mostly) web-based information, pictures, and website links to examine the available juvenile justice services in their zip code and answer questions regarding social, demographic, and economic issues that potentially exist for juveniles interacting with these services.

• Students were not only responsible for their own WIKI project, but were responsible for posting questions / comments on their peers’ WIKI pages.











In the previous version of this course, the communication and collaboration were primarily traditional classroom interactions between instructor and student.

This project enhanced the overall interactions between instructor and student, as well as amongst students. Since each individual was responsible for creating a particular wiki page and providing feedback to their peers’ wiki pages, it enhanced the overall communication within the course. Moreover, since the wiki page assignments correlated to the major course topics, the classroom discussion was also enhanced.

(e.g. “Prevention / Diversion” chapter)

Textbook discussion / Traditional lecture

Wiki project

Guest speaker (teen court)



In addition, the CJ3300 course is a “writing intensive course.” Previous versions of this course involved a 10-12 page final research paper on the related topic of the student’s choice.

One of the drawbacks of the traditional paper is that the topic is specific and often does not draw on the overall course topics.

For the WIKI project, the writing remained intensive, while also encouraging students to write on a variety of subjects and address a variety of issues.

Previously, final papers on the subject of “gangs” would make-up approximately 2/3rds of all final papers. With the WIKI project, not only did everyone write on the subject of gangs, but everyone also wrote on policing, treatment, diversion & prevention, institutionalization, and juvenile courts.



To measure the effectiveness of the Juvenile WIKI project, a mixed-methods survey was provided to examine the effectiveness of the project.







Thank You.

11th Sakai Conference - June 15-17, 2010 18

Scott Wm. Bowman, Ph.D.

Department of Criminal Justice

601 University Dr., San Marcos, Texas 78666

(512) 245-3584 / [email protected]

Education

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