Considerations of qualitative methods have helped coax me towards a topic. I'm having difficulty completely detaching topic selection from considerations of "how the heck am I gonna do that!?!?" Thinking more about investigation into adolescent readers' motivations I'm considering a research question along the lines of "how do extracurricular reading habits/tendencies of different level readers influence an adolescent's sense of why literacy is important." My hope is that the implications might point towards how a teacher in a classroom setting might be able to affect both the adolescent's tendency to read (beyond the classroom hopefully too, but more immediately in the classroom) as well as to help him/her internalize why it's REALLY IMPORTANT to be able to read well!!!!
So with that vague destination in mind...a simple quantitative assessment of who are strong, average and weak readers based on achievement will help me select a stratified (and small) sample. Using one or two select representatives from each group, I'd administer an in depth survey/interview that will provide insight into what the students extracurricular reading habits/tendencies are as well as questions to measure their sense of literacy's importance using an attitude scale. This would preferably be done early during the research period so that I could observe those same students and their classroom behavior patterns.
This all feels pretty nebulous but it's a topic I'm intrigued by. I fear that it will be difficult to generalize though. The findings/implications may have some value as an ethnographic study to me as an English teacher in Winston-Salem as well as point towards more focused/sophisticated research in the future.
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2 comments:
Ted, this is a good direction. I appreciate that you are integrating the new things we are learning about research. Literacy is a huge topic these days, and anything which might positively impact it would be interesting. Extracurricular reading is perfect. You will need to think more about data collection methods...
Ted, your research question sounds great, but instead of starting off choosing a few students to do in depth interviews with I might suggest starting off by asking a large number of students to complete a survey. The survey could use likert scales to focus on areas such as: How much/often do you read for fun? Do you normally read the assignments for English class? What is your approximate grade average in English class? (You could perhaps ask for their grades from the teacher)
This survey will help you identify which students read a lot and which read little in each level (You could also ask for the teacher's help in selecting these students and bypass the general survey entirely). From the results you could then select two high readers and two low readers in each level to do short interviews with. Interview questions could extrapolate off the questions listed above, but you also ask more direct questions such as, Do you think reading is important? Why/Why not? Just some ideas.
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