Methodology, Data Collection, and Analysis
This is a descriptive case study of two biology teachers, Ed and Jackie (all names are pseudonyms), and two English teachers, Charles and John, over the course of the second semester of their first year of teaching. All four of the participants enrolled and successfully completed a course in teaching reading in the secondary school and received their teaching credentials in spring 2005 from the same institution. The teachers agreed to participate in the study because MBT Shoes they believed that students’ ability to comprehend content area text was important and that they had tools (in the form of strategies) to support their students’ reading. All were in their mid-20s with teaching as their first career. None of the participants taught in the same school. For this study, each teacher chose to focus and gather data on one of his or her college preparatory classes that meet the requirements for entrance into the state university system.
Several types of data were gathered to gain a richer, more accurate picture of the participants’ practices. An actual tracking system of the teachers’ practice in addition to teachers’ self-report was critical because, according to Ross and McDaniel (2004), in self-reports teachers had a tendency to inflate their use of reading strategies. Therefore, I collected a minimum of 10 weeks’ worth of consecutive lesson plans from the second semester of the participants’ first year of teaching. Included were any supporting documents such as PowerPoint presentations and overhead transparencies, handouts and worksheets, and readings taken from the Internet and other reference materials. I observed each teacher once in the classroom and interviewed each teacher one to two times for approximately 45 minutes using a semi structured interview protocol. Before the start of the interview, each teacher completed a questionnaire indicating their familiarity with 20 reading strategies covered in their literacy course.
Where appropriate, simple statistics and counts were used to analyze the documents. All interviews were analyzed qualitatively through a process of identification of patterns and themes across cases. To ensure fidelity of findings, all of the interviews were coded by the researcher and a graduate student.
Ed taught at Washington High School, which was divided into several small schools. It was rich in diversity with approximately 20% of the students identified as Caucasian, 20% African American, 35% Hispanic, with the remaining 25% representing a variety of ethnicities. Seventy percent of the students were eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch, and the school had sporadic success Clearance MBT Shoes over the last several years, meeting its Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) with fewer than 45% of the students scoring proficient on the English language arts standardized tests. Four of the 36 students in Ed’s class were identified as English-language learners (ELLs), and seven had Individual Education Plans (lEPs). The class was a mixed-grade class with some students repeating the course.
Though the textbook was written at the ninth-grade level, Ed found that many of his llth and 12th graders had difficulty making meaning of the text. “You could give them a paragraph with what you think is very clear explanations and then ask them a question, and they can’t pull the information out of the reading.”
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