In early July, Peter Freebody and Peter Johnston wrote the first in a series of blogs on how practicing professionals in literacy might think about research and its implications. They focused primarily on a category of research that is familiar to most people—controlled studies intended to test theories and to answer questions such as “What works?” and “Which works best?” This is the sort of research most frequently invoked to inform policies and instruction.

Often left out of conversations on “what research says” are studies that dig deeper into school and classroom ecologies and into the lives of students, their families, and communities. Much of this research is qualitative in nature, relying not on statistics, but on methods such as talking and listening to participants and observing them over time in the contexts of teaching and learning. The purpose of this research is not to make claims about what works best, but instead illuminate the complexities of participants’ experiences in ways that are not possible to understand in studies using only fixed, controlled variables.

Good examples of what we can learn from broadening our sense of what “research says” can be found in research on adolescent literacy from the past few decades.  Before the 1990s, most studies of adolescents focused narrowly on the problems associated with textbook reading across the curriculum and were driven by theories assuming that problems were the product of individual cognitive deficiencies and poor texts. However, secondary content area teachers were still not likely to infuse teaching strategies that emanated from this research in the years following its dissemination (O’Brien, Stewart, & Moje, 1995).  

Subsequent qualitative studies examining the broader social, cultural, and political influences on adolescent literacy and exploring the multiple dimensions of students’ lives and literate practices help us see the limitations of narrowing our attention to cognitive processes and conventional school reading. In short, students’ literate experiences are constructed by the texts and tasks they encounter, their identities as readers and people—shaped by school, culture, and society—and their reasons for engaging in literate activity, among other factors. In other words, simple strategies for improving text comprehension that ignore these complexities would be wholly inadequate. Consequently, if you believe, for instance, that a procedure for teaching close reading you have been instructed to use is not having the promised effect, you might consult some of these studies (e.g., Moje, Dillon, & O’Brien, 2000) investigating the social and cultural complexities of adolescents’ lives for perspectives on why. 

Related studies like these, particularly those exploring literate practices out of school and in digital environments (e.g., Black, 2009; Leander & Lovvorn, 2006), reveal adolescents using sophisticated strategies, developing positive identities, engaging with others around complex tasks, and experiencing a sense of agency in literate practices that matter to them within these other spaces despite being viewed in school as marginally engaged or competent. Studies like these and others that uncover the range of positive consequences for students when they are engaged in literacy, such as shifts in moral, social, and personal development (e.g., Ivey & Johnston, 2013), also might inspire conversations in schools about whether we should be satisfied with conventional outcomes, such as demonstrating competence in informational reading as measured by a standardized test.

As Freebody and Johnston noted in their post, “The function of research in education is to help us understand what we are doing in new ways, to develop better explanations (Deutsch, 2011), to approach our teaching practice with the new eyes provided by better theories about what we do.”

Gay Ivey, PhD, is the Tashia F. Morgridge Chair in Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is vice president-elect of the Literacy Research Association and a member of the ILA Literacy Research Panel. Peter Johnston, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Albany-SUNY. He is a member of the ILA Literacy Research Panel.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.