Content Area Literacy: Student & Teacher Perception Surveys

Research & Development Leads

This collaborative project involves researchers from three universities; practitioners and students from three school districts; and facilitators from the SERP Institute. 

The partnership includes: Elizabeth Moje and Jenny DeMonte from the University of Michigan; Catherine Snow and Joshua Lawrence from Harvard University; David Pearson, Elaine Mo, and Marnie Nair from the University of California, Berkeley; and Carole Bausell and Suzanne Donovan from SERP; with the Boston Public Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, and the Detroit Public Schools.

Description  

The student and teacher survey project is designed to help administrators and teachers make informed decisions on how to improve content area literacy in their schools while advancing the knowledge base about content area literacy more generally.  A pair of surveys, one for teachers and one for students, elicits information about 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. 

Data are being analyzed with reference to achievement information available for some of the research sites, and a student archive of work produced in each content area class. Although sample size at each site only allows for exploratory findings, these data will provide a unique view of in- and out-of- school literacy and literacy across the content areas from multiple perspectives.

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 Adolescent Literacy Development (ALD) Survey (Moje, Overby, Tysvaer, & Morris 2008, see www.umich.edu/~moje) had been previously developed as part of an NICHD-funded study. It was significantly adapted and then integrated into this project. 

The Teacher Survey* was created through an iterative process, and piloted in both the Boston Public Schools and the San Francisco Unified School District.  Several teachers participated in cognitive labs with experts from University of California, Berkeley, who conducted in depth individual interviews to tease out weaknesses in the survey. 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 ALD Survey so that comparisons could be made across the contents.  Both instruments were further modified per district request.

Evidence Base

Pooled responses from a first round of 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 Public Schools. The team is developing useful formats for conveying findings to schools for use in improvement efforts. Assessment and student data are being merged. Archived student work from one of the schools is being coded with reference to the survey items.

Forecast

The hope is to acquire RISE or other assessment data in some schools to use as context for interpretation of survey findings.

The Surveys  

SERP is currently constructing web versions of the surveys and a companion website about adolescent literacy. Please visit an early beta version by clicking here.

Resources

“The Complex World of Adolescent Literacy: Myths, Motivations, and Mysteries,” by Elizabeth Birr Moje, Melanie Overby, Nicole Tysvaer, and Karen Morris, in Harvard Educational Review, Spring 2008.

“Summer reading: predicting adolescent word learning from aptitude, time spent reading, and text type” by Joshua Fahey Lawrence, in Reading Psychology, 30:445–465, 2009.