Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Academic literacies

A new project on 'embedding academic literacies into university curricula' will feature on this blog in the coming months. This fits the elearning theme because the educational strategies to be developed and described would not be feasible without technology.

Like many research projects, this one features an ongoing literature review. Key finding from a NZ Ministry of Education funded project Lighting the Way provide useful reference points from an adult literacy perspective. My first observation is that some of the best practice recommendations would be hard to implement in a large scale university context, e.g. a learning plan for every learner would be particularly challenging in large first year courses. Others may not be so relevant, e.g. family literacy programmes. There are, however, many useful sources (and many hours of reading!) in the 126 page Foundation Literature Review.

After the usual executive summary, scope and methodology sections, the main body of this Review covers:
  • Quality;
  • Participation and retention;
  • Features of provision;
  • Reading;
  • Writing;
  • English for speakers of other languages;
  • Numeracy; and
  • Literacy contexts.

The conclusions include a section on 'developing a cycle of research that informs policy and practice'. This reflects the design-based research approach, which is popular, though not always practiced, by the tertiary elearning community; a situation in focus for another research work-in progress with Caroline Steel from University of Queensland. Comings (2003, p9) is quoted as follows.

"In his paper on establishing an evidence-based system, Comings (2003, p. 9) proposes a process that follows a set of recurring cycle of steps in order to improve the links between research and practice:


* a review of existing research and professional wisdom to inform the design of baseline models for teaching and support services that conform to the best available evidence

* evaluation of these baseline models to establish outcomes and impact

* practitioners using the results to inform and make decisions about their practice

* practitioners’ experiences of putting the models into practice are shared

* based on this review, additional research is undertaken, thereby leading to a constant revision of the model(s).

He argues that this process can not only lead to refining existing models of practice, but also allows new alternative models to be explored and provides a sharper focus for professional development."


Comings, J. (2003). Establishing an evidence-based adult education system. Cambridge MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education.


More reflections on this project will follow. Feel free to comment and invite discussions.