Surveys

You began class by doing some more writing about the focus for your project.   You should be spending some time thinking about the kinds of questions that interest you & the kinds of problems you hope to solve, and reading broadly to identify ideas that you might be interested in studying.  Within the next two weeks you should have a clear enough idea of your focus to begin focused reading on your topic.

You signed up for conferences where we will put together a draft list of important researchers and studies related to your topic.

Conference times: Wednesday, February 16
4:00 Eric
5:40  Kena
6:00 Nic (but I am hoping to reschedule)
6:20 Josh
6:40  Fran

If you send me an email with a short description of your general focus - I will have some time to think about useful texts for your work ahead of the conference.

Surveys:
We began our discussion by thinking about what kinds of data surveys can provide -and the purpose they are therefore best suited for.  The study guide is meant to highlight important questions/terms and direct you to the sections where Mertens covers those ideas.

Fran started our discussion of Integrating Multimodality into College Composition. She defined the purpose of the survey as "to learn more about what composition teachers were doing with multimodal composing, what technologies they used in support of composing multimodal texts, and how faculty and administrators perceived efforts to introduce multimodal composition into departmental curricula and professional development;" and she pointed out that the authors had not clearly defined the term.  She also connected to an issue raised by Merten - that surveys can open up assumptions that researchers bring to their work - by discussing how Anderson, et al's essay had asked what was displaced by multimodal teaching - and subjects had responded by recasting what happened not as displacement but as altering, shifting or remediating the work of writing classes.

We used discussion of this text to consider problems associated with sample selection (participants were self selected and were primarily from Research I univeristies); how data interpretation from such samples can still produce powerful and important results (multimodal teaching had little support, was primarily sponsored by individual instructors - implications?), and how the paradigm drives the statement of findings implications (this seemed a pragmatic rather than a transformative study).

Josh discussed Web Literacies of the Already Accessed and Technically Inclined.  The quoted the main focus of the study as  “…a study of electronic literacy as practiced by middle-school students belonging to a highly successful economic group may strike some as suspect…[y]et if we consider that literacy ethnographers target for scholarly inquiry those sites where changes in literary practice are afoot, then the American Institute of Monterrey is a choice site, for literary education at AIM is both undergoing and causing significant change.”   At this point I emphasized the fact that this study was authored  by three individuals with three very different perspectives, and drew attention to pointed the theoretical lenses the authors used to look at "change." Josh indicated disatisfaction with the clarity of focus + findings for this study - and our discussion considered how the authors' analysis was in some sense directed toward making sense of a set of answers that would make no sense (as Josh pointed out) if presented in terms of statistics.   I chose this reading because of its conflicted paradigm, the narrative interpretation of findings, and the way the authors both did and did not draw attention to the social justice issues that accompany the adoption of new literacies as a social, 
economic and educational standard of proficiency.


We then used what we had learned about developing effective surveys as a basis for assessing the dispositions survey created to assess incoming college composition students.  We first identified what we wanted to find out - and then reviewed the questions.  We looked at clarity of language (whether the statements would generate unambiguous responses), coverage (did we find out about what students knew about writing, how they used it, and how they felt about it?).  We didn't cover issues related to how the data would be assessed (statistically as in Multimodality) or in terms of a narrative (as in Web Literacies).


Good class and good discussions.  Thanks!


For next class:
Read: Mertens, Ch 8- Qualitative Methods with attention to grounded theory, participatory research, and focus groups.  Miller:  Invention and Writing in Technical Work: Representing the Oject (1994) 843 (Nic);  Community Literacy (1995) 1097 (Eric)