Research and Development Model (Cont'd)

After nearly three years of working with this unique integrated and collaborative research and development model, we were asked to participate in the National Youth Literacy Demonstration Project conducted by Literacy BC and School District #36 — known as The New School @ Surrey. Now in our second year of the project, we are working with program and administrative staff to implement, study, and document a demonstration literacy program for disengaged youth who struggle with reading and either have dropped out or are at risk of dropping out of school. Our task is not only to identify promising practices, but to document the challenges that students face in trying to improve their skills and reconnect with school and learning. Since the New School is a national demonstration project, research expectations are higher than if we worked with a single program. Given the various audiences for the results of the project, neither a purely quantitative, nor a largely qualitative research design would work. And an experimental design with a control group was out of the question, both in terms of cost-effectiveness and feasibility since our model was still emerging. We needed to be pragmatic in our approach and had to find a middle ground between empirical research that used random assignments and relied largely on testing, and a purely qualitative design in the ethnographic tradition which would yield rich data but would make it difficult to show learner gains over time. In the end, we opted for a flexible design that used mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) and a research model that has been termed “realistic research” or “real world research” (Robson, 2002).

Through the mixed method design, we want to demonstrate what it takes to implement a sound intervention for struggling readers who face multiple turbulence factors in their lives. But we also need to measure what happens to kids as they engage in literacy and academic learning and learn to become more socially responsible and emotionally mature. Since we know that literacy learning is strongly influenced by social factors, we also want to find our more about the lives of our students outside of the classroom.

New School Research Methods and Measures

What then are some of the methods and measures we use in the New School research? Basic attendance and persistence data will show us what participation patterns are and to what extent the school has been successful in retaining students with very low attendance rates in the past. Scores from a standardized reading test will show learner gains on sub skills of reading, including vocabulary knowledge, decoding skills, and comprehension skills, so that we have a better sense of where individual students are strong and where they are stuck. (Last year we had a couple of students who still struggled to make sense of print and were lacking even basic word attack skills). Yet this test will not tell us what strategies students try to use to gain meaning from print, how they feel about reading, what topics or books might resonate with them, or how they use literacy in their daily lives. To discover these things we need to observe them to see what learning opportunities engage them, expose them to a wide range of reading materials, and pay attention to how they respond.