Investigating the effects of a T-Shaped Literacy intervention on Year 7 & 8 students’ reading and writing in subject English

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

This design-based project will use quantitative and qualitative approaches to investigate the effects of the innovative T-Shaped Literacy Model on Year 7 and 8 students’ disciplinary reading and writing in subject- English. A total of 40 teachers from predominantly low- decile schools throughout NZ will partner with us to co- design, implement, investigate and re-design units in which students (n>1000) will read text sets linked by a “big idea” (such as evocation of mood or narrative reliability) and conduct and synthesise complex literary analyses of multi-modal text sets, and apply what they learn about language to their own writing.

WHAT WE PLAN TO DO:

We will support teacher-partners over each year of the project to plan and implement three units of work (e.g. narrative reliability) in a series of online co-design and PLD sessions. Informed by design-based research principles, analyses of pre-assessments and student and teacher voice will inform the design of all PLD sessions and learnings from each completed unit will inform the design of the subsequent unit. Repeated measures of students’ reading and writing will include standardised measures and more disciplinary-specific researcher- designed measures. Student work and student voice will also be collected and analysed. Teacher-partners will complete reflection journals and participate in focus group interviews. A quasi-experimental design will allow judgements about effectiveness; each year there will be a treatment group, who participate in the PLD, and a comparison group who do not. In 2023, the 2022 comparison group will become the treatment group and a third group will receive a “lite” version of the treatment.

AIMS:

To understand the extent that the T-Shaped Literacy intervention is associated with accelerated progress of Year 7 and 8 students in standardised and researcher-designed measures of reading and writing.
To enhance teacher practice and understand how teachers sustain and integrate new practices into their literacy teaching ‘kete’.
Within a research-practice partnership, explore how teachers access and use professional learning, then adapt and implement developed units of work with their ākonga.
To understand factors that act as barriers and enablers for the implementation of T-Shaped Literacy.

WHY IS THIS RESEARCH IMPORTANT?

There is a pressing need to learn how to transform literacy teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand so we can become more effective in preparing more learners to read and write more complex texts for more diverse and more complex purposes. Local, national and international data all show a pattern whereby many students, despite having acquired strong foundational skills and knowledge in the early years, struggle to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated and subject-specialised literacy demands expected in the later years.

OUR PARTNERS:

The project is a research-practice partnership between University of Auckland researchers and Year 7 and 8 teachers, and their students, from The Manaiakalani Programme (TMP), internationally recognised for its expertise in digital pedagogy.

CONTACT DETAILS:

Associate Professor Aaron Wilson
DDI: (09) 373 7999, extn 48574
Email: aj.wilson@auckland.ac.nz
The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland Mail Centre, AKL 1142, NZ