Pre-Proposal

Empirical Research Pre-Proposal

Introduction
I have taught developmental reading before in a learning community and found it nearly impossible to teach reading without composition, and the composition teacher found it nearly impossible to teach comp without reading. After an internship with Dr. Kathryn Valentine where I looked at various reading programs to see what worked and what didn’t, I’ve become interested in combining a reading/writing course. The main goal of the course at this time is to see if a Reading/Writing/Workshop course better meets the needs of developmental students that the separated Reading and Writing courses we currently have in the NMSU system.

Research Questions
1. Will combining reading and writing into one course help developmental students to move more quickly from developmental courses to regular college courses?
2. Will students who complete this accelerated set of course work fair as well in the academy as those who take the standard courses?

Literature Review
My work is based on writings by Nancy Atwell (1995) and Jeanne Henry (1998). Atwell focuses on how to teach a writing workshop where students actually write rather than simply talking about writing. Henry takes Atwell’s ideas and applies them to a reading course where students actually read rather than talking about reading. The workshop portion of my project will be designed around these ideas.

James Paul Gee (1989) talks about little-d discourse and big-D Discourse by stating that being literate in Discourse requires more than simply being able to read and write. Students must be fully integrated into the academic realm in order to understand how to be a student. My goal is to help students to transition to big-D Discourse as smoothly and quickly as possible.

I know that I have read studies that talk about student drop-out rates for those who begin in developmental courses, but I haven’t had time to track those down again. The research shows that students who begin college in the developmental track often leave school before they are even finished with the developmental courses that they are taking. There are many hypotheses about why this is so. My goal, however, is to see if speeding up the process will help increase retention and success of these students.

Research Design
I plan on doing two stages of this project. The first stage will be built on grounded theory. My overall goal is to gather and analyze data in order to develop solid questions that I need to ask. The second stage will then be a solid research project that looks into the questions that were gathered.

For this first portion, I will be working with other CCDE 110 teachers to gather data about students. I will create a questionnaire of open-ended questions for students to fill out at the beginning of the course, in the middle of the course. The purpose of these questionnaires will be to see how well students feel their needs are being met in the developmental courses they are taking. The questionnaires will be designed around the course goals and objectives for CCDE 110 and will ask students how they feel they are meeting those objectives on their own and how the instructor is helping them to meet those objectives.

I will also be gathering student artifacts from all of the teachers to code them. I will teach my courses as the Reading/Writing/Workshop courses, and the other teachers will be teaching using their traditional methods. As I code, I will be looking for differences in how students respond to the questionnaires as well as how students are performing in certain areas in their artifacts.

Passion and Positionality

What is guiding my research is what I want to discover. I am passionate about students learning and keeping developmental students in school. Too many of them drop out before they get out of their developmental courses. I don't want them to do that. I want them to understand that we are all developmental in something (for me, it's auto repair. I can change a tire and change my oil, but that's about as far as my mechanic ability goes!). So, part of what is guiding my project is trying to keep developmental students in school. How can we help them to integrate into the academy?

Now, that takes me back to my original thoughts about trying to combine reading and writing skills into a single class or into a grouped couplet. I need to spend more time on my methodology because I don't really know what I want to find out or how I want to discover it. (Assessment is definitely one of my weakest links.) I want to collect student papers and other artifacts to give me a grounding for what they are writing and how they are writing. But, I don't think those writings will give me enough of the whole story. Therefore, I want to do interviews and journaling so that I can, perhaps, gain greater insight into what the students are thinking. I'm choosing this particular methodology mostly because it seems to be the most student-centered and allows the students a voice in my research. I want them to tell the story of what is happening as I struggle to figure out how to make it better. This is what I am "passionately committed" to.

I am struggling to figure out how to add some quantitative to this kind of research though. I definitely love the qualitative because of the story and voice elements. But, there is a part of me (maybe the sciencey part) that doesn't feel that the research is complete unless I throw in some numbers. What would I count though? Or, do I need to count anything? Can I just put some anti-itch cream on that part of me that's itching to add numbers? If not, how do I take a closer look at what's causing the itch?

Online Journals

After looking at both Computers and Composition Online and Kairos, I was most impressed with how different these journals are than traditional print journals. This is something I knew is some form or another, but hadn't really thought about or experienced first hand. And, what surprised me even more is how uncomfortable I was with the format. I use the internet all the time and enjoy searching around for various things. However, I guess I still and an old-school linear type reader when it comes to academic journals. I tended to not give as much credence to what was being said because the medium didn't seem appropriate.

So, that got me thinking about my expectations and why I have them. I honestly think I am most uncomfortable with the online formatting because I feel that everything that is written in an academic article is important (as opposed to things posted on Wikipedia--I have no problem bouncing around there), and I'm afraid I'll miss something vital if I'm allowed to choose where I go next. Also, it seemed like there was too much information thrown at me all at once. If I read in a printed journal, I know that an article is, say, 15 pages. However, with this online format, I didn't know how long I'd have to read before I covered all of the information that I could access for this particular article. I wanted to have a clear stopping point.

I find all this interesting about myself because I know that even a linear journal article can't contain everything in 15 pages. I know there is more out there. But, I have this artificial sense of reading "all of it" rather than wondering if there was a hyperlink that I missed somewhere. I did find more articles in Kairos that I was slightly more comfortable with because they had the option of clicking the "next" and "back" keys (or something similar). The Computers and Composition Online site didn't have anything that looked like "traditional" formatting to me (which I think is the whole point).

I'll have to think more about my comfort level and try to identify why I am unnerved by a different format. I am especially interested in this because I consider myself a pretty techy person. This has given me a new appreciation for how uncomfortable my students may feel with some of the assignments I give them. I knew there was a level of discomfort, but it has been so long since I've experienced that with technology that I'd forgotten just how uncomfortable it can feel.

Questions for presenters

1. What would be the first steps to get a feminist-based publication like this going?

2. How do you overcome the barriers that the formal structure of the University creates? For instance, how receptive are professors of feedback and critique given by grad students?

Online Research

I must say that I am struggling within myself with the merits of online research. I definitely see it as a new area of interest. It has developed into it's own society. However, I still find myself in the old-school thought that "real" research should be relevant to real lives. So, to me, what happens online isn't "real life" for people. I use the internet for fun and finding information. I use it for communicating with friends, family, colleagues, and students. But, even with all of these uses, I don't consider it my "real life." When I think of the types of people that would think online communication is their real life, I think of the stereotypical gamer who sits in his basement all day and night playing World of Warcraft and never interacting with people face-to-face.

With this said, I don't know how I feel about online research. Jen has talked about her MySpace study and the different issues she's had with that. It's made me view the space in a different way. However, I'm not sure that how girls portrayed themselves on MySpace is what they would claim is the "real" them, or whether it's a persona. How can we know? And, does it matter?

The readings brought up intersting ideas of how careful we need to be even (or, perhaps, especially?) with online research. Most people don't realize how open their information is when they post things online. We tend to believe that only our friends and family will look at what we've done. But, anything online is open to anyone who wants to search for it. The idea is really creepy. So, are we, as online researchers, also creepy stalkers? Or, since our intentions are not malicious, is the internet a free space for us to gather information? It is true that people will act more like themselves if they don't know that they are being studied. However, all of the ethical issues that we've talked about in class come forward and need to be addressed.

I know this is a lot of babbling, but that's because I don't have a clear understanding in my own mind of where I think online research should reside. I need to learn more and think more about it before I feel I can make a real choice in the matter.

Ethnographies

There are definitely ways that I am biased in my own research. I struggle to look at things honestly when I have my own agenda. For instance, right now I am researching the best practices for teaching reading at the University. Although I think there are some skills that simply need to be memorized (like multiplication tables, for instance), I find myself being extremely critical of teachers who use the skill-and-drill method of teaching. It's hard for me to look at the assessments they do in an unbiased way. It doesn't matter how much improvements students have made from the beginning of the term until the time I look at the data, I am always skeptical about what the teacher is doing. The data has little relevance to me because I am so against this style of teaching.

I have had to force myself to step back and allow the evidence to speak for itself. I can't just assume that I know all the answers (because, obviously, I don't!). To do a true ethnography in this setting where I am so biased, I think I would definitely need another person to help me code. It would probably be best to have someone who has no vested interested in teaching styles too. I would also need help from "outsiders" to design good research questions that would not be leading. Since I definitely have a slant already, I would need others to help me eliminate that slant as much as possible from the actual research portion. And, finally, I would need to rely on video and audio taping rather than my own biased notes to allow myself and others to see a clearer picture of what is going on.

Research proposal idea

I am really interested in developmental courses at the college level, especially reading and writing programs. These programs are separated into 2 separated classes, but I fail to see how students can write without reading or read without writing. What I am interested in doing is looking at reading only, writing only, and reading and writing programs. I am especially interested in seeing if reading and writing combo classes exist at the college level.

After doing research on what programs exist, I would like to do a pilot program at the Alamogordo campus where I have students for 2 courses--reading and writing. (I know that I would have to work with lots of logistical problems involving scheduling and enrollment, but it's doable.) The first time through would be a pilot study to see how students in my courses compare to students who are taking reading and writing as separate courses. (I need to work on how I will assess this.) The goal would be to figure out how to best scaffold learning so that students can get out of developmental as quickly as possible and into the main stream courses that they will be getting actual credit for.

Once the program has been piloted, I would like to do the courses again, but look at case studies of individuals who are in the program. This second time through would give me a better idea of how the two courses are working or not working for students.

I have participated in Learning Communities where I have been the reading instructor and have worked with the composition instructor to form cohesive links between the two classes. The feedback that we got from the students, however, is that there was a lot of overlap in what was being taught. In other words, I was unable to teach just the reading portion of the work, and the other instructor was unable to teach just the composition part of the work. I think the two need to go together in order to be as effective as possible. If I am teaching both courses, then I will know exactly what I am teaching about reading and exactly what I am teaching about writing in order to make the two courses completely complimentary. It would have the same benefit as a Learning Community also in that students will build a social network that they can rely on to help them be successful in college.

This is a rough sketch of my plan. Any suggestions (especially for assessment) would be much appreciated!