THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 14, 1994 TAG: 9410130174
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JO-ANN CLEGG, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
WHEN PAM BEHRENS and Jan Kitchin sat down at the computer last year and started pounding out a how-to book for middle schoolers faced with writing term papers, they didn't expect that they'd produce a best-seller.
All they really wanted to do was make a little sense of the chaos that inevitably happens when a pre-teen is first faced with having to look something up, then write a paper on it.
``Students were coming up to the library not understanding how to do research,'' Behrens, a library media specialist at Landstown Middle School, said.
``Teachers were assigning the tasks differently,'' Kitchin, Behrens' counterpart in the school's high-tech but comfortably cozy second-floor library, chimed in.
The result was that the quality and content of research papers and the use of research methods varied widely from class to class, student to student.
Behrens and Kitchin thought it would be nice to have a standard guide which students in all three grades could use.
They studied the available publications and found nothing that, in today's computer language, was very user-friendly.
Or, as they prefer to put it, very student-friendly.
So they hit the books and the computers and, with the help of a 13-member committee, produced their own. The red-paper-covered 96-page copyrighted publication called the ``Landstown Middle School Style Manual, A Guide for Writing Research Papers'' provides the youngsters with logical, easy to understand step-by-step instructions which run the gamut from choosing a topic to tips for keyboarding a paper on a typewriter or a word processor.
The goal of Kitchin, Behrens and the others involved in producing the book was to overcome some of the frustration youngsters feel when faced with a research assignment.
The results have been better than the library media specialists ever dreamed.
``I had two kids who came in to work on their research and didn't want to leave,'' Kitchin said. ``They wanted to know if they could come back and work during lunch.''
``We had one who went back to the stacks and yelled, `Hey, I'm finding things,' '' Behrens added.
That kind of enthusiasm is music to the ears of teachers and librarians trying to pique the interest of students raised on video games and MTV.
Eighth-grader T.J. Hestand, who set up shop in the library after school one recent afternoon, had his own opinion of the book. ``It makes it a lot easier to write a paper,'' he said. ``It lets you organize it easier and keep track of it,'' he added as he happily surrounded himself with note cards, resources and the ever-present style manual.
Teachers are enthusiastic as well.
``My students used it with their research projects,'' Daria Rupe, an eighth-grade language arts teacher, said. ``And I've never seen the writing of research papers like I did with these students. I've never had so much success.''
So impressed was she that she told the other members of her graduate class at Regent University about the publication. ``I'm taking a box of 60 to class,'' Rupe said. ``Everyone wants one.''
The reaction of the Regent class is typical. Teachers who have a chance to see the book invariably want copies for their own students.
Lots more teachers will get that chance this weekend when Behrens and Kitchin present a workshop on the manual at the annual meeting of the Virginia Association of Teachers of English.
And there will be another chance to show off Landstown's project in the spring when they do a workshop at the Virginia Middle School Association Conference.
Development of the style manual was part of Landstown Middle School's five-year involvement in the Accelerated School Project developed at Stanford University. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by JO-ANN CLEGG
Jan Kitchin, left, and Pam Behrens helped produce the ``Landstown
Middle School Style Manual, A Guide for Writing Research Papers.''
Eighth-grader T.J. Hestand said the book ``makes it a lot easier to
write a paper.''
by CNB