Boston Field Site

Current Research Collaborations

• How do middle school students and teachers explain students' reading challenges, and what role do they believe they should play in addressing them?

  Team members from the SERP field sites in San Francisco and Boston were joined by collaborators from the University of Michigan for this three city project to construct and pilot a set of instruments for eliciting teacher and student perceptions of literacy roles, attitudes, and practices in and out of school.

  Timeline: 2008 to present

  Leadership Team:
  Catherine Snow, Harvard
  Joshua Lawrence, Harvard
  Elizabeth Moje, University of Michigan
  Jenny DeMonte, University of Michigan
  David Pearson, UC Berkeley
  Elaine Mo, UC Berkeley and SERP
  Tina Cheuk, SERP

  How do middle school teachers explain students' reading challenges, and what role do they believe they should play in addressing them? How do students view themselves as readers? This project has constructed and piloted a set of instruments for eliciting teacher and student perceptions of literacy roles, attitudes, and practices in and out of school. The project seeks to uncover whether there are patterns in what teachers think about their literacy teaching, their own literate practice, and their students' literate practices. It also looks at differences between what teachers and students report on these topics: for example, how much time students report reading at home versus how much time teachers believe students read at home. Included too are questions about the gaps between teachers and students when it comes to literacy practices using technology and non-traditional media. Although sample size at each site only allows for exploratory findings, the information gathered from this project when displayed against a backdrop of student achievement scores, has the potential to be useful to schools as they strive to improve literacy across the content areas.

  Development

  Team members from the SERP field sites in San Francisco and Boston were joined by collaborators from the University of Michigan for this three city project. The Moje Student Survey was developed as part of an NICHD-funded study, and integrated into this project. The Teacher Survey was created through an iterative process, and first piloted in Boston. It was then piloted in San Francisco with several of the teachers participating in cognitive labs with experts from UC, Berkeley, who conducted in depth individual interviews to tease out weaknesses in the survey. The responses led to further refinement. Finally, a survey research expert from the Institute for Social Research (University of Michigan) reviewed the instrument, making observations about the wording and order of items which in turn led to other edits. The survey was then aligned to the Moje Student Survey so that comparisons could be made across the contents. Both instruments were further modified per district request.

  Evidence base

  Data are still being collected. Pooled responses thus far from 60 teachers in three cities suggest that middle school teachers in science, social studies, language arts, and math generally see value in some type of literacy instruction in their respective content areas, but lack specific knowledge of literacy theory and teaching practices that could support such work. Despite the trend for students to be increasingly involved in reading through technology at home, over two thirds of teachers say that access to technology is usually or almost always a challenge at school.

  Status

  Data collection is continuing in Boston, San Francisco, and Detroit. The team is developing useful formats for conveying findings to schools for use in improvement efforts.

  Forecast

  The teacher and student survey instruments will be posted online to encourage easy access and use. The hope is to acquire assessment data through the RISE to use as context for interpretation of survey findings.

  Visit the Survey website