Career-Technical Education Research News

Travis Park, principal investigator of Authentic Literacy Applications in CTE: Helping All Students Learn, talked about the current status of his project with Catherine Imperatore of the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE). His study employs an experimental design with qualitative evaluations of interventions to evaluate the efficacy of two literacy models for application within CTE and strategies that help students construct meaning from texts. The study’s purpose is to determine the impact of disciplinary literacy strategies on the reading comprehension and motivation to read for students enrolled in CTE courses by comparing the effects of literacy strategy instruction under two models of content area reading interventions and a control condition. The two models are (1) the ALS Framework and (2) the MAX Teaching Framework.

Recently, Dr. Park and his colleagues have been engaged in training teachers in the use of these reading frameworks and their associated strategies.  Here’s an excerpt from their conversation:

Travis Park:  I think there are a couple of issues that we’re starting to find that have emerged from especially our interviews with the teachers, but in the pilot phase, I think the most interesting thing we found, is that ‑ and we hoped to find this, and we did ‑ that career and tech ed teachers, while we typically think of our disciplines as hands‑on and experiential learning, do involve a lot of reading. And a lot of that reading is authentic and technical materials and so if we can use that opportunity with real, live authentic text and incorporate some reading strategies with that, then we found that the two treatments, the reading frameworks that we used, actually improved the students’ reading comprehension and their use of vocabulary. And so it has a significant impact on improving student achievement. That was very exciting that we’re finding that. With our pilot phase, those findings occurred over about an 11-week trial period. And so we’re gearing up for the full, year‑long intervention in hopes that we see that those significant results are magnified over the course of the year, so teachers are helping students develop quality reading skills.

Read more about Authentic Literacy Applications in CTE: Helping All Students Learn at the NRCCTE website. Read the transcript here.

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