What Sources of Research Do You Find Especially Valuable?
Research can justify a constellation of literacy practices that guides instruction toward the development of readers and writers in academic disciplines. For example, the research on questioning in comprehension, in terms of the questions asked of students as well as the questions students generate themselves makes a case for a series of well-known applications: K-W-L, Question-Answer Relationships, Questioning the Author, Reciprocal Teaching, and Socratic questioning. As a result, the instructional emphasis becomes one of mentoring students to adopt an inquiring mindset to their reading and to pose their own questions of authors and texts.
DWM: What sources of research do you find especially valuable
DB: Syntheses of research literature that point toward certain classroom practices (and perhaps away from others) are particularly helpful. Scholarly analyses of the range of research regarding some facet of literacy provide us practitioners with a solid basis for translating what these findings might mean for teaching and learning in our classrooms.
I have found professional networks to be the best pipelines for discovering significant research. My involvements in both IRA and its state-level affiliate, the Wisconsin State Reading Association, have continuously put me in touch with the evolving research landscape. Foremost among these networks are professional conferences and meetings where those of us interested in adolescent literacy share practices as well as recommendations for research. I have found presentations by scholars at national and state IRA conventions to be can’t-miss opportunities, especially because informed voices in the field can point out shortcuts toward indispensable findings. Published research syntheses such as the several editions of the Handbook of Reading Research and What Research Has To Say About Reading Instruction as well as volumes targeted for adolescent literacy such as those found at IRA’s Focus on Adolescent Literacy website are essential resources.
DWM: What line of research have you found to be especially productive?
DB: For over two decades I have been tracking the research on comprehension strategy instruction, since that remarkable surge of findings from the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. I have been particularly interested in how such research can guide literacy practices in content classrooms. A fatalistic attitude toward the reading comprehension of students—a resignation that some students will comprehend a text and some inevitably will not—is seductive. The conviction that teachers can exert considerable influence over all students’ comprehension ultimately is very empowering. When I share research that shows comprehension strategy instruction having a substantial impact, I build a compelling case for integrating literacy practices into the flow of content instruction.
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