Project Directors: Sarah Warshauer Freedman
and Elizabeth Radin Simons, University of California at
Berkeley.
The Freedman and Simons national teacher research project
explored the dynamics of learning to write and writing to
learn as students come together in multicultural
classrooms. The project involved teachers at four urban
sites, representing different regions of the country:
Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco. At each
site there were six teacher-researchers teaching eighth,
ninth, and tenth grade English or social studies classes
in urban schools with multicultural populations. The
project sought to understand how teachers can organize
classrooms to take advantage of a diversity of backgrounds
and to meet a variety of needs for instruction. Besides
producing individual teacher-research reports, the project
coordinated and synthesized the national data
collection. With its design, this project offered a new
model for teacher research and for university-based
collaborations with teachers.
Project Director: Robert Calfee, Stanford University.
Calfee's project was designed to evaluate current practice
in portfolio assessment of writing in the elementary and
middle grades. The project aimed to advance knowledge and
practice in order to solve problems, both theoretical and
logistical, in the design of more valid, performance-
related assessments, especially those falling under the
rubric of portfolios. The primary interest was in
portfolios serving the classroom teacher for instructional
decisions; a secondary perspective examined the value
of classroom portfolios for other accountability purposes.
In collaboration with participants from major, contrasting
portfolio assessment projects around the nation, the
project examined and clarified several fundamental
issues regarding the use of portfolios to evaluate student
writing, namely, what work is to be collected, under what
conditions, for what purposes, and evaluated in what ways.
The project reviewed various existing portfolio
project designs, analyzed the tasks of interpreting and
evaluating the contents of portfolios, and considered
various schemes to use portfolio data from individual
classrooms to inform schools and districts about the
role that portfolio assessment could play in reforming
writing instruction in schools.
Project Directors: John R. Hayes and Karen A. Schriver, Carnegie Mellon University.
The Hayes and Schriver project provided writers
and educators with better methods for assessing complex
writing skills. The project included two studies. The goal
of the first study was to develop new methods for assessing
complex writing skills in academic environments.
Participants in this study are college freshmen. The goal
of the second study was to develop methods for evaluating
the effectiveness of communication when factors such as
age, social class, and race create cultural differences
between writers and readers, so that writers can
understand the impact their texts have on audiences who
are culturally different from themselves. The study
explored communication between health care organizations
that distribute drug information literature and the high
school and college students for whom the literature is
intended. The project addressed questions about the
validity and reliability of various methods of evaluating
writing and pointed toward innovative ways for teachers to
encourage students' literate abilities.
Project Director: Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon University.
Flower's project studied the teaching and learning of
argument across multiple contexts. Like other writing-
across-the-curriculum studies, it showed how writing and
argument are used to meet very different educational
goals. Learning to generate rival hypotheses, for
instance, demands different skills from using sources to
support a personal opinion, or from reaching consensus in
a community group. This project, then, helped to
develop a more accurate picture of students' situated
cognition, revealing what it means to teach and learn this
family of skills across the curriculum and across literate
contexts. In addition to examining what teachers teach and
the texts students produce, this project analyzed students' thinking to document how
students are interpreting instruction in argument, the
kinds of problems they are having, and the ways they
resolve those difficulties.
Project Director: Glynda Hull, University of California at Berkeley.
Hull's project documented the literacy demands in two kinds
of workplaces: one labeling itself "high performance,"
having adopted new technologies and new forms of work
organization in an effort to increase productivity, and
the other a workplace from the same industry which is not
undergoing such changes, conforming instead to more
traditional, Tayloristic models. Within these workplaces,
Hull focused particularly on entry-level positions for
non-college-educated applicants, identifying the literacy
requirements for employment and advancement, and examining
as well the kinds of training or education provided by the
companies. This study provided information to the
secondary, post-secondary, and vocational education
communities about the changing literacy demands of
workplaces and offered recommendations about the kinds
of literacy instruction that seem most useful in helping
workers adjust to future, more technologically complex
work environments.
Project Directors: John Ogbu and Herbert D. Simons, University of California at Berkeley.
The Ogbu and Simons project examined ways in which
knowledge about minority communities can inform the
teaching of writing. Data for the study was a subset of the
data collected for John Ogbu's Community Forces and
Minority Education Strategies Project. Specifically, the
data for this project were questions related to literacy
learning taken from extended interviews of Mexican
American, African American, and Chinese American parents
and students. The Community Forces Project looked at the
cultural models and educational strategies of what Ogbu
has described as "voluntary" minority groups (Chinese
American) and "involuntary" minority groups (African
American, Mexican American) to identify those models and
strategies which contribute to success in school and those
which are less useful. This Center project considered two
questions: What are African American, Mexican American,
and Chinese American cultural models of and educational
strategies for language and literacy learning? How do the
differences between the groups' cultural models and
educational strategies help explain the differences in
school performance? The identification of cultural models
and educational strategies of the different minority
groups helps teachers, researchers, and policy-makers
develop new and more effective ways of teaching literacy
to all non-mainstream groups.
Project Director: Jabari Mahiri, University of California at Berkeley.
Mahiri's project investigated how elements of African American and popular youth culture can be used as a bridge to give explicit models and motivation for students to further develop abilities to write and think critically. The development and implementation of a curriculum intervention taught students first how to be critical consumers of popular culture texts and second how to produce similar texts through writing. It subsequently tested the extent to which developing student competence to critique and create these texts can be built upon to further develop their competence to evaluate and interpret other literate texts and to model aspects of them in their writing. The project identified and workrf with teachers on the development and implementation of the curriculum and teaching strategies in an Oakland public high school with predominately African American students.
writ@socrates.berkeley.edu
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