RESEARCHINNOVATIONResearch in Georgia State University’s College of Education & Human Development • Fall/Winter 2015

Writing in the

Who is your audience?

Whether they’re writing in a note-book or typing their work in a blog, writers must consider who they’re writing to or for as they put their words down on paper (or screen).

Associate Professor Ewa McGrail wrote a chapter about audience construction for a 2014 book entitled, “Exploring Technology for Writing and Writing Instruction.” For this chapter, she studied 15 fifth graders’ blog posts, paying close attention to how they identified and addressed their audiences based on

feedback from teachers, peers and those reading and responding to their writing online.

Throughout the year, language arts teachers gave the fifth graders assignments that could be completed through blogging, which they did in a computer lab once a week. These assignments served as a springboard for students to interact with those who read and commented on their work, which included retired teach-ers and graduate students the teachers recruited for this year-long project as well as fellow classmates and teachers at their school.

Her study examined the audiences students invoked in their writing – those specifically mentioned in the text – verses those who were actually reading the blog posts. McGrail found that most students invoked a general audience with frequent usage of the generic “we” or “you” in their writing, while they interacted with the retired teachers and graduate students the most.

“Young writers in our study were very strategic with the choices that they made about the audiences that

Digital Age

The College of Education and Human Development is bringing together faculty whose research touches on the ways we communicate with words, sounds and images in both conventional and online texts, and how teachers can prepare their students to be 21st century writers. Their work demonstrates that there are plenty of facets to explore when it comes to

Composing for an audience: Students find their voice through blogging

}{CONTINUED – page 2

}{AUDIENCE continued

they invoked, and in particular about the audiences they addressed,” she explains. “With the exception of the few who responded to nearly all commenters, the majority of the young writers responded very selectively to their audiences, choosing the readers to whom they wished to write back.”

McGrail’s study also sheds light on the importance of giving young students multiple opportunities to practice and improve their writing.

“Being strategic about composing for an audience is an important skill for writers to possess,” she concludes.

Developing digital literature on a budget

When you read aloud the hardback copy of Mary Peterson and Jennifer Rofé’s “Piggies in the Pumpkin Patch,” you get to decide whether you’ll oink like the pigs or snore like the sleep-ing sheep they pass on their way to the pumpkin patch.

But if you read the digital version of the story on a computer or tablet, you’re more likely to come across sounds, animation and narration that help tell the story.

Associate Professor Teri Hol-brook’s extensive research on literacy and language arts and her experiences writing novels and short stories help her to think critically about digital interactive stories – especially when it comes to creating one.

It’s a process that can be costly and time-consuming, given the need to assemble a team of artists, animators, writers, programmers and developers to create the finished product.

Holbrook wondered if this prevented underfunded groups or individuals

from sharing their voices through interactive digital stories.

“If digital literature is to be a dominant form of human expres-sion, how is its expense and complicated production impeding the participation of text-makers and limiting what can be said or imagined in digital forms?” she said.

To find out, she partnered with an artist and a developer to produce an original digital novella entitled, “Dethany in Virtu/Noir,” which is available to download on iTunes. She presented the completed work at a digital writing conference in Bath, U.K., over the summer and at a panel discussion at Atlanta’s annual DragonCon convention this fall.

“Our goal was to challenge ourselves creatively as we explored just how financially feasible a digital text such as this is,” Holbrook said.

“With an eye on our budget, we made judicious use of animation, employing it where we thought it

most effectively impacted the story. We admit it was a bit ambitious for our budget – next time, we’ll only develop a single plot instead of the interconnecting plots we designed for this text. But it was important work for me as I consider who can ‘author’ and how in the digital age.”

ARTISTS // ANIMATORS // WRITERS // PROGRAMERS // DEVELOPERS

Read McGrail’s full study:

McGrail, E., and McGrail, J.P. (2014). “Preparing young writers for invoking and addressing today’s interactive digital audiences.” In K. E. Pytash & R. E. Ferdig (Eds.), Exploring technology for writing and writing instruction (pp.54-76). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Read Holbrook’s digital story:

Holbrook, B., Holbrook, T., and Lotshaw, J. (2015). Dethany in Virtu/Noir. [Interactive novella: IOS application]. USA: King Features and Pencil Rough Productions.

Portfolio offers more nuanced look at writing than standardized assessments

Students in Georgia take standard-ized writing tests in third through eighth grades and after certain high school courses as part of the Geor-gia Milestones assessment system. In these writing tests, they’re generally given a standardized prompt based on a set of readings and a specific amount of time to write an essay response, which is then sent to a testing center for evaluation and scoring.

Students’ scores on these essays are used to ascertain how well a student can write, but Assistant Professor Nadia Behizadeh’s research challenges the design of current writing assessments and proposes changes that could better determine students’ writing ability.

In a 2014 article for Educational Researcher, Behizadeh offers a critique of traditional, standardized writing assessments, noting that a single timed essay written in Stan-dard American English doesn’t allow students to incorporate other dialects or languages that may enhance their response to a specific prompt.

She also argues that using a portfolio of writing samples – in which students can present work in multiple languages/dialects and include their personal reflections on their writing – gives a more nuanced look at students’ progress without removing their cultural influences.

“The task of writing is ultimately rooted in a writer’s sociocultural background and the current socio-cultural context in which the writer is creating text,” Behizadeh writes. “We need large-scale writing assess-ments that provide useful and reliable information on student progress and align with writing as a set of sociocultural practices.”

Does culture play a role in preschoolers’ early learning? Zhang investigatesAssistant Professor Chenyi Zhang is working with researchers at Purdue University and East China Normal University to see what role culture plays in preschoolers’ ability to learn crucial school readiness skills, such as literacy and mathemat-ics.

“The overarching goals of this research project are to explore the development of mathematics, literacy and executive function in Chinese

children, and to investigate whether the development of these skills varies across cultural contexts,” said Zhang, whose research team received an international seed grant from Geor-gia State University last year to begin the work.

Zhang and his colleagues are current-ly analyzing data from observations they conducted in preschool classes in Indiana, Georgia and Shanghai, China, and hope to expand their

project to incorporate data on children with special needs.

In addition, researchers involved in the project will meet with and present their findings to faculty and administrators at East China Normal University and Georgia State, which Zhang believes will help lay the groundwork for further collabora-tions – including graduate student and faculty exchanges – between the two universities.

Read Behizadeh’s full article:

Behizadeh, Nadia (2014). “Mitigating the Dangers of a Single Story: Creating Large-Scale Writing Assessments Aligned With Sociocultural Theory.” Educational Researcher, 43(3), 125-136. DOI: 10.3102/0013189X14529604

Language arts teachers may not always have enough class time to meet individually with students about their writing and still teach the day’s lesson.

Instead, they either conduct quick meetings with students or make edits on students’ papers, pass them back and ask to see revised versions at a later date.

Assistant Professor Debra McKeown recently conducted a study with researchers at Georgia State University and Vanderbilt University to see if giving individual students pre-recorded audio feed-back on their writing through an app called Notability helped them revise their work and better understand how to improve their writing.

The study, in press with Education and Treatment of Children, focused specifi-cally on students with emotional and behavioral disorders, who are more likely to make surface-level changes

to their work (i.e. spelling and punctuation) rather than addressing more in-depth revisions that can impact overall writing quality, such as organization.

McKeown’s research team gave a special education teacher instruc-tions on recording useful, thoughtful audio feedback on students’ writing, and teaching students to use the audio to revise their work. This method not only helps teachers give individualized attention to students,

but also ensures they know what kind of information to include in their feedback and shows students how their teachers’ suggested revisions can help them improve their writing.

“In this case, students who did not previously enjoy writing or believed they couldn’t write changed their attitude toward writing and every student spontaneously indicated liking the intervention and wanted to continue using it,” McKeown writes. “There is power in consistent individual feedback in which students listen and respond at their own pace.”

Research has shown that early writing skills predict how children develop other literacy skills, such as recognizing letters or identifying sounds that make up a word.

Associate Professor Gary Bingham’s recent article in Early Childhood Research Quarterly consid-ers how preschool teachers actively promote children’s writing and how the learning environment they create in their classrooms has an impact on their students’ writing skills.

Bingham and two colleagues devel-oped an assessment method called

the Writing Resources and Interac-tions in Teaching Environments (WRITE) to observe preschool teachers’ writing instruction across a range of early childhood education settings.

They found that nearly all preschool teachers provide materials to support children’s writing, but the ways they used these materials to teach writing skills varied widely across the classrooms they observed.

His study highlights the importance of better understanding how children’s access to writing materials

and interactions in early childhood contexts make a difference in their writing development.

Bingham will continue this focus on writing in preschool classrooms as the co-principal investigator on a four-year, $1.49 million grant project (iWRITE) from the Institute of Education Sciences that will create an online professional development intervention for preschool teachers to improve their teaching practices and children’s literacy skills.

Audio feedback helps underperforming students edit their work

Early instruction crucial to understanding how children learn to write

Look for McKeown’s forthcom-ing study in Education and Treatment of Children:

“Effects of Asynchronous Audio Feedback on the Story Revision Practices of Students with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders.”

}{CONTINUED – page 5

African-American girls internalize, address negative media portrayals

Assistant Professor Gholnecsar Muhammad has noticed a pattern of African-American girls and women depicted in public spheres as “overly sexual, violent or confrontational, judged by physical features or invisi-ble across mainstream media and within school classrooms.”

“These portrayals are incomplete, absent of their own voices and fail to represent the full vision into the lives of black girls,” she said.

With such negative and inaccurate portrayals permeating current

discourse, Muhammad sets out to study how African-American girls view and represent themselves and how they react to this public repre-sentation by creating literacy spaces that center on their voices. These literacy spaces reflect earlier 19th century black female literary societ-ies in which readers organized to write across issues that were most urgent.

In an article published this year in Research in the Teaching of English, she outlines a study she conducted with eight African-American girls ages 12-17. Muhammad met with them regularly, introduced them to African-American women’s literature that they read, interpreted and discussed, and then had time to write on their own. Their writings ranged from personal narratives and poetry to short stories, informational pieces and open letters, within which they discussed community, cultural, individual, intellectual, kinship and sexual representations.

This project, which also encouraged the girls to share and critique their works, showed Muhammad the complexities inherent when girls internalize and address societal misrepresentations of African-American women and girls.

“I was reminded that researchers and educators must not get trapped in singular profiles of Black girlhood as seen publically in media, in literature and within society,” she writes. “This was something that the girls resisted and wrote against.”

She also notes that educators should take this study to heart and consider how the content they’re teaching may impact how young girls view them-selves. She suggests literacy educa-tors move beyond skill goals and what’s measured on tests; instead, they should set goals to help youth understand selfhood and critically respond to injustices in the world.

“If educators can understand girls’ identities and ways to engage them in writing, this knowledge can help support them in crafting writing experiences in classrooms that not only build their skills but also help youth to make sense of who they are,” Muhammad writes.

}{ EARLY WRITING continued

“Project iWRITE is intended to improve the quality of classroom writing environments, teachers' implementation of effective writing strategies, and lead to better writing, literacy and oral language skills for preschoolers,” he writes in the grant proposal.

Read Muhammad’s full article:

Muhammad, G. E. (2015). “In search for a full vision: Writing representa-tions of African American adoles-cent girls.” Research in the Teaching of English, 49(3), 224-247.

Read Bingham’s full study:

Gerde, H., Bingham, G. E., and Pendergast, M. L. (2015). “Environmental and teacher supports to writing in classrooms.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 31, 34-46.

Learn more about his grant:

Gerde, H., Bingham, G. E., and Bowles, R. (2015-2019). “Development of the Improv-ing Writing Resources and Interactions in Teaching Environments through Profes-sional Development (IWRITE-PD) for Teachers of Economically Disadvantaged Children.” Institute of Education Sciences. $1,499,994.

Georgia State UniversityP.O. Box 3980Atlanta, GA 30302-3980

Open to interpretation: Viewing the Common Core as a living document

In 2010, the Georgia Board of Education adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a set of national academic standards in math and English language arts that have now been adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia.

Critics have decried the standards as a one-size-fits-all approach to setting curriculum for teachers, but Assistant Professor Sarah Bridges-Rhoads worked with Mars Hill University’s Jessica Van Cleave to look at the Common Core as a living document in a piece for the National Council of Teachers of English’s English Journal.

“Recently, we have found promise in … shifting the focus away from locating the meaning of the CCSS toward an examination of how that text can be read and understood in a

specific historical, cultural and political moment,” she writes.

By considering the Common Core as a document that does not have a single meaning or interpretation, Bridges-Rhoads and Van Cleave take into account the idea that teachers can make multiple careful and informed readings of the Common Core’s standards. On the basis of those readings, they can create unique lesson plans that respond the specific needs of their students. In addition, they argue that educators should think about the kinds of questions they’re asking about the Common Core as its implementation continues.

“The CCSS represent one entry in a long line of entries in the recent history of the standards movement in

the United States,” Bridges-Rhoads writes. “However, we believe that changing conversations about the CCSS away from battles between the right and wrong way to read them and toward questions of what possible readings we might enact, presents an opportunity to shift how the history of the CCSS progresses from here.”

Read Bridges-Rhoads’ full article:

Van Cleave, Jessica, and Bridges- Rhoads, Sarah (2014). “Rewriting the Common Core State Standards for Tomorrow’s Literacies.” English Journal, 104(2), 41-47.