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?