Connecting Practice and Research: Integrated Reading and Writing Instruction Assessment

The first "Connecting Practice and Research" column (Lampi, Dimino, Salsburg Taylor, 2015) introduced a Research to Practice partnership (Coburn Penuel, 2016) between two faculty from a community college and a university professor who were aiming to develop effective integrated reading and writing (IRW) instruction through a sustainable, professional development model. A second column examined the refinement process these instructors experienced while designing and implementing the IRW course (Salsburg Taylor, Dimino, Lampi, Caverly, 2016) In this third column, we will review how this partnership became a rich source of data for researching and evaluating both IRW as well as the accompanying professional development via Torraco's (2014) call for research on practitioner scholar collaborations: "Practice is not only a setting for the application ofknowledge, it is a source ofknowledge generation" (p.  (2016) defines educational research as a "scientific field of study that examines education and learning processes and the human attributes, interactions, organizations, and institutions that shape educational outcomes." We chose to complete educational research on this research to practice partnership using both evaluation and research (Boylan Bonham, 2009) First we used formative evaluation to gather evidence to assess our pedagogical practices during the first 2 semesters which the course was taught. Second, we used summative evaluation after the course was taught for 2 years to determine the value of the professional development for the faculty, students, administrative, and researcher stakeholders. Third, we designed qualitative research studies to allow us to create knowledge about IRW theory and practice, collecting and analyzing observations of the faculty's content and pedagogical understanding through a survey. Fourth, we used quantitative research for measurement and calculation to inform and verify the extant IRW theory and practice. Fifth, we gathered additional quantitative, student performance data to measure and calculate effective instruction and student success over time to inform our research to practice partnerships.Our partnership developed an IRW course with learning outcomes that were as much about curriculum development as they were about pedagogy. Within the curriculum of this course, the readers and writers informed, persuaded, and/or entertained each other. It was neither a reading intensive writing course nor a writing intensive reading course. Both readers and writers completed a process of making meaning: the reader with the writer, and the writer with the reader. As students in this course gathered information transactively from multimodal sources, they converted this information into knowledge by developing existing schemata and creating new schemata as they made meaning. Students also composed meaning through reading and writing texts to meet discipline based task demands (Shanahan Shanahan, 2012) Additionally, through developing their metacognition, students monitored their strategic choices socioculturally en route to constructing this meaning making.Students also engaged in learning labs where they were guided collaboratively through an academic task explicitly addressing affective, cognitive, and metacognitive learning domains. These labs exposed students to additional multimodal texts in a collaborative setting where they constructed meaning through their emerging multiliteracies and reflected on the process of meaning making for a variety of reading, writing, and thinking tasks they were likely to encounter in college and their future workplace. In other words, the IRW curriculum and pedagogy engaged students through carefully designed instruction in order to encourage their consuming and producing strategies to transfer to gateway courses and beyond.IRW Formative EvaluationFor this partnership, our formative evaluation goals assessed whether our generational model (Caverly, Peterson, Mandeville, 1997) was feasible for long term professional development of IRW instruction among community college faculty and whether it had a positive effect on students.