I will share the entire proposal here once
Multiple audiences will benefit from our research. Most importantly we may provide evidence to state policymakers local school system administrators about effective interventions to improve writing. Given the stagnant low scores in national writing assessments our research will highlight tools and instructional routines that may improve argumentative writing through the use of digital tools. Dr. McVerry and Dr. Hicks both sit on statewide educational commissions and will use this venue to share the results with policy makers.
School administrators will also benefit from our research in the use of providing individual students with their own website and domain. School systems pour millions into portfolio systems when a website controlled by the learner maybe the best portfolio of all. We believe this “personal cyber infrastructure” will also raise writing achievements. Therefore if our theory of change leads to the hypothesized outcomes we will provide evidence of ways resources could be strategically deployed to improve learning.
Teachers, staff, students, and parents will also benefit from this research. Understanding the role the web plays in defining credibility is now a life lesson. Having students learn markers of credibility while presenting their “most credible self” online we believe will not only improve student writing but it also provide opportunities for agency as a writer.
Other educational researchers will benefit from the open nature of this project. First all deidentified data will be made openly available. Some local school districts may allow students to publish on the web. We will also openly license the software developed as part of this proposal. Researchers will be available to follow update, issues, and pull request.
We will reach our audiences mainly by publishing everything on the web. All development will be done on GitHub in open repositories. All field notes, observations, meeting minutes will be published on individual researcher websites and then syndicated back to a project feed. Researchers will publish reflections on their progress. Teachers and students will do so and share their work governed by the acceptable use policy in place. Reflection and iterative design are hallmarks of this project. We will create a newsletter in a manner and style useful to policymakers and practitioners. Basically our canonical urls will capture a sequential record on the design process and discuss how the intervention was developed.
We will also publish our work in scientific, peer-reviewed journals. We have made a commitment early on to only publish in venues that are open sourced. There are a growing number of well respected journals that allow for open publishing. We believe knowledge is better served when it is accessible to everyone.
We will also present at national and international conferences to a wide variety of audiences. The Scientific Advisory Board coincides with the annual Literacy Research Association conference in December and the annual IndieWeb summit in June. Dr. Hicks serves on leadership roles within the National Council of Teachers of English and we will disseminate our work across those networks. We will also present our research annually at the American Educational Research Association Conference. Finally our partnership with the National Writing Project on this grant brings in a network of thousands of teachers who will have access to all our findings/
We will publish a final cost benefit analysis after the conclusion of the study. This will describe the effectiveness, practicality, and the estimated expense for other districts to try and replicate our intervention.
Featured Image: Stigma&Dissemination_Flickr flickr photo by Everhartz shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
One response on “Spreading the News: Our Dissemination Plan for a #DoOO and #IndieWeb Grant”
Mentions