Assessing and Online Forum

During the 2006-7 school year, I researched how online conversations could be measured for assessing reading comprehension and the affect using said forum could be used to promote literacy growth. The following is the report that now, only five years later, has practically become the "norm" with the influence of educational wikis and shareware (like “edmodo,” “Googledocs,” and other social media.) I will later use this study to support the use of social media in the classroom.

Abstract

Literacy was a primary goal for the 2006-7 school year at Londonderry High School, New Hampshire. In response to this initiative, I created Learning Theories. Learningtheories.org is a website designed to discuss young adult literature for both pleasure and as an assessment tool. Teachers and students are given equal authority on the book-club-type forum and need only to log on once registered. My study looked at whether using an online forum was a practical means of assessment. The study included two months of web-design, followed by three case-studies.

Importance of Study

As a reading specialist, student literacy and providing opportunities for improved literacy are my primary goals. Teachers are offered professional development opportunities to become more diverse educators of reading in an effort to improve literacy all-around. In spite of these efforts, there is still a student population (often made up of those considered “at-risk”) who do not contribute to class discussion about books they may actually have read. Informal observations of high school students over the past five years have shown that although they might not have much to say in a class, these students are loquacious and erudite when using technology such as instant messaging, creating blogs, etc. In response to this, I designed and created a forum-based website (learningtheories.org) for students to respond to assigned readings of literature with the intention of assessing their thinking through a less formal genre similar to the instant messaging they are so actively using.

The Teaching Unit

The first case-study involved a total of ten students in a small-group setting using young adult literature circles as the medium. The second case-study used the website as a learning tool for the students to converse from different classrooms on the same book, while the third was conducted through a Civics classroom on a voluntary basis. Overall, the study revealed that an online book discussion is a valid form of assessment, but that to use it in the classroom, it is necessary to first be sure that the students and teacher buy into the idea, and then train students in conducting book discussions independently of their teacher and the website so that the quality of discussion reveals accurate results of their reading comprehension.

Data Collection MethodsTo acquire data, I provided all students involved in the three case-studies with both pre and post questionnaires, as well as providing those students with directions on how to use learning theories. I trained the first two case studies, but only introduced the third to the technology. I also collected the actual conversations. They are available in full text on the website to all registered users. With the first two case-studies, I also had group interviews with all students involved. This proved to be the most effective means of extracting data.

Major Findings Overall, the study revealed that an online book discussion is a valid form of assessment, but that to use it in the classroom, it is necessary to first be sure that the students and teacher buy into the idea, and then train students in conducting book discussions independently of their teacher and the website so that the quality of discussion reveals accurate results of their reading comprehension.

Little Surprises

I was surprised at the difficulty of using technology on a regular basis in a non-tech-rich classroom. Often, Lit-lab is a class that requires improvisation, based on student needs. The biggest challenge was strangely finding the time where I could provide a computer to all students at once.

I also was surprised to find that the school’s computers were not able to appropriately view the website’s graphics. It seems that the graphics and lack of music on the actual website were the biggest complaints from students, rather than the educational aspect of the site. This provides me with direction for re-creating the web-site to be more student centered. The data collection showed that the students will be more likely to use the discussion board/forum if their ears and eyes are entertained while they work. This will provide me also with a query for further research.

Reflective Practice

For this form of assessment to be successful, I will need to integrate it as a standard part of how lit-lab is run. Because of positive changes taking place within the program the next year, it will be permissible to assign homework. I am hoping that the combination of the program improvements, with what knowledge I have gained from this study, will provide me with the necessary tools to improve the efficiency of this assessment method that overall turned out to be a success.

Socialized Literacy Structure (I need to rewrite)

 If one were to approach literacy, not just in the facet of reading, but in its full capacity for understanding, it becomes clear that true literacy combines reading, writing, and speaking.  Similar to Freud's construction of the self and Moffet's concept of scaffolding to educate the individual, this triad helps create continuance for a more specialized self, encouraging constant reflection and development.  It is, rather, more structurally linked to C.S. Peirce's triadic theory of language, later attributed to Sassure for his linguistic model.

For Freud and Moffet, the self and the idea move from the chronological (listed) to the analogical (more sophisticated) and interconnect, creating a continuance and timelessness of thought progression. For the individual, this means that one becomes more specialized in areas of thought that are paid more attention to, resulting in more effective communicaton as the triadic structure builds upon itself.

For this reason,  sophistication becomes essential in order to effectvely communicate with an audience (both direct and implied).  Although the level of speech pattern exists, this also rings true for the comprehension of outside reading (in symbolic as well as concrete structures and "naming" the world) and crucial as we make our mark upon it.  Here, the early writer wants begins at the, "id," wanting to satisfy the, “me, me, me, now, now, now” of creation rather than develop a final product of a piece. 

Socialization and audience thus becomes necessary to develop the necessary implied social cues as ego comes into place.  As writing becomes more social and formalized, it takes on the strata of the alter ego. The further one progresses, the more specialized the writing must become in order to appropriately communicate with the audience, relative both to the purpose and to the work. Moffett himself argued that, "the early egocentric speech of the child becomes gradually ‘socialized’ and adapts itself to other people."  This ideology, much like those held by Piaget and Vygotsky moves, "from a private world of egocentric chatter to a public universe of discourse."  This discourse allows for the specialized communication within a language and symbol-structure to fully communicate for effective understanding.

Wiggins and McTighe also argue that our understanding is not linear, but made up of six faeets.  Through their research, much of which aligns with Gardner's sensory learning tableau and Piaget's developmental phases, we instead can attach the term "writer" to children because of their sound-play and adhering of words to the physical and psychical world.  In Moffett’s words, “we ask the student to tell what happened in four different rhetorics –to himself as he spontaneously recalls a memory, to a friend face to face, to someone he knows… and to the world at large” (27). A student will learn to scaffold a skills-based literacy in order to bring Bruner’s symbolic phase to a realization significant to their emotional development initially laid out by Freud's conception of the "self,"  thus bringing the argument full circle.

Later in his study, Moffet continues to analyze the cognitive phases of Bruner (inactive, iconic, and symbolic) as the child manipulates and interprets space with what he calls, "image summaries" that later help to carry out logical operations as well as said physical manipulations.  Bruner's ideology connects also to the triadic literacy structure, almost as sub-triads for each facet; the inactive voice is thought/iconic words/ symbolic as representamum; for reading the inactive aligns with decoding, the iconic is the basic understanding,and the symbolic how it adheres to the outer world; for writing, the inactive is the physicality that goes into the written word, the iconic is the combination of convention and organization, and the idea and voice conveyed symbolically through metynomical means.

Though Moffett focuses his research on writing, the concept of an individual beginning the process of cognition internally and gradually formalizing that understanding is easily translated to various skills-based curricula.
As students move towards a more formalized education, representative of the transitional markings , their ego matures, and they are able to learn social mores and an “egocentric” understanding of literacy.  The child formalizes vocalizations that allow them to become more effective communicators, thus with an even more formalized thought momentum that equivocates publication, being that there is now an implied (if not actual) audience in mind.  Their  finished written product demonstrates mastery and growth of a given strategy for reading, writing, and or speaking.The combination of reading, writing and speech helps provide the emotional mandate  needed to, "play on the symbolic scale," allowing students to not only discover voice, but to discover their own voice and effectively express it on the written and therefore material platform.


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Moffett, James. “I, You, and It” College Composition and Communication 16. 1965. 243-48.