Update on my secondary sources

Searching for secondary sources is a journey. There is plenty of information on students to muddle through but what I am hoping to find is not what I come across too often. I want to find interview analyses, data on authentic responses, and survey results. I want the primary perspective via secondary sources, which is not readily available. This is not what scholars report. Maybe that’s the kind of information I can only get through my primary sources. The information I find more often is still useful because it provides me with a large, general sense of what researchers continue to focus on. There has to be a reason for the multiple studies on the same subject, such as the effect of gender on student attitudes. But if those studies result in inconclusive information, then why do researchers continue to explore it? Again, this still provides me with another researcher’s insight. There is evidence that researchers want to know what influences a student’s attitude towards writing. We just have different ideas about how to investigate the topic and what effects it.

I am pretty open minded about what effects a student’s attitude. And the way I want to investigate it is by going straight to the source – students. At least that’s where I want to start because I cannot gather data and formulate statistics without initial information. Some articles seem to begin with statistics and work the other way around. For example, beginning with standardized test scores and analyzing why those students did well. Or beginning with attendance records and predicting graduation rates. The student perspective is not explored as often as numbers are. The information does not include a student who explains why they did well on a standardized test or why they attend school every day. As I predicted, this information may not be easy to translate into perfect numbers. Open ended questions do not produce statistics. Another problem I am having with finding relevant secondary sources is that the research is not based on students in secondary schools. Lots of research concentrates on college aged students.

 On the other hand, I have an awesome secondary source that gave me a deeper understanding of how students feel about timed writing assignments. “Power, Resistance, and Literacy: Writing for Social Justice” by Julie A. Gorlewski includes excerpts from interviews she conducted with NY high school students. They talk about how they only practice, practice, practice for the writing portion of the standardized test in English class. It is very structured, timed, and boring. They are constantly doing one kind of writing in school, and even though some students write on their own outside of school for pleasure, they rate themselves according to the writing score they get on the standardized test. They don’t blame the teachers for the state requirements they must achieve because they are all just following the rules. Students wished they were asked to go deeper on the writing portion of the test instead of analyzing a quote from a book every single time. They want freedom, creativity, flexible formats, and original assignments. This source is definitely a gem.