Building a Proactive and Collaborative Research and Development Model:

Real World Research in the National Youth Literacy Demonstration Project

Heide Spruck Wrigley

Literacy research can be lonely work. I have been a researcher and evaluator on numerous large-scale studies and program evaluations for over 15 years. The work has been exciting, challenging and often quite frustrating. By definition, outside researchers do not get to be part of the programs they investigate. They are expected to stay aloof from practice, to ask pre-prespecified questions, collect information, analyze test scores, and then write up results in formats specified by the funding source. Typically, outside researchers do not give opinions or offer advice, since such involvement could result in a lack of objectivity. It could also pollute the data because some programs might make changes based on the researchers’ input. Practitioner input into research is generally not welcome or sought only in the initial phases, most often as part of an advisory panel.

It is not surprising then that, for many literacy programs, the news that they have been selected for a national research study, while flattering, is not entirely welcome. Programs are expected to cooperate fully by providing data about their students and answering researcher questions and by offering researchers access to their classrooms and to their students. Programs often don’t hear about the results of a study that they have been part of until much later when data collection and analysis are completed, a process that might take years. When the results are finally published, often the reports do not speak to practitioners. Methods and findings tend to be discussed in dense academic prose; statistical information is written by and for other researchers and thus is not accessible to most lay people. Implications for practice may be entirely missing or not grounded in the realities of the everyday work of literacy practitioners.

When I have been involved in this kind of study in North America and abroad in Egypt and Poland, there has always been an underlying sense of frustration. As a former teacher, I wanted to sit down with other teachers to explore ideas about classroom teaching and learner engagement. I wanted to spend much more time finding out what really was happening in a program and why, and I wanted to work with teachers to try out new ideas. However, the strong emphasis on quantitative data in most large-scale studies makes it difficult to get at the deeper story of why things work or do not work. Most frustrating perhaps has been the realization that in the literacy field we are researching and evaluating programs that operate on shoe-string budgets that limit what can be done and thus offer little evidence about what might be possible with additional resources.