Getting Started: (Advice for New Adult and Family Literacy Programs)

Putting Research to Work

As part of an issue reflecting on "why we do what we do," it seems worthwhile to ask the same question about the Texas Adult Literacy Clearinghouse. According to the TCALL website, our job is to ensure that adult educators in Texas, whatever their speciality, receive the resources and information they need to do their work. This responsibility includes passing relevant and helpful research information along to practitioners. In the Fall of 2001, the staff of the Clearinghouse began a research project of their own, with the aim of discovering what kind of use adult literacy practitioners make of the research resources they come across.

We sent out a survey to 404 providers, and received 143 replies, or about 35%. The low response rate means that we have to be careful about what we can claim about educators in Texas as a whole, even though the people who did respond were fairly similar to the overall population of adult educators. We followed up with a series of telephone interviews with sixteen practitioners from all over the state. We learned a great deal about research and Texas adult educators from these two sources, and hope to use the information to improve our services. Please see How Adult Literacy Practitioners Use Research on our website if you are interested in a more detailed discussion of the research.

The single most surprising result was that two thirds of our respondents told us they had changed their practices as a result of research, and gave examples of what this meant. Even the smallest change was educationally significant, so it appears that for these people research really does make a difference to the way they do things. People with more experience in adult education (including family literacy, adult provision and English as a Second Language) use research more than those folks with less experience. This was a surprise to us, since we expected that new people would use research more, as a way to learn about the field and discover strategies for teaching. Less surprising was the finding that people with specific training in research or experience conducting research were more likely to use it extensively in their work.

When we interviewed practitioners we discovered three main ways in which they applied research to their work. The first is program or course design. If people are setting up a new educational setting they look at research literature to find out what is happening in other programs and to get ideas for the kind of activity they should include. The second is program improvement. When a problem arises, or there is pressure for a change, research is a useful resource. The third application is validation. This is when people use research to support or justify what they are doing. There are both internal and external versions of validation. Internal is where research is used to justify particular decisions to the program director or the board, and external involves people outside the program, such as funders.

One question practitioners must answer for themselves is which research to believe, often a daunting challenge. Practitioners answering our survey first considered whether they recognized and trusted the source of the research. Another influence was whether the research supported the practitioner's own point of view, although it was not as significant as we expected from our literature review.

The overarching message of our project is that practitioners use research in strategic and pragmatic ways. In other words, they choose research based on the results they are hoping for. This is made easier by the many contradictory messages found in research - you can use research literature to prove that ESL learners should be taught in their first language AND that they should be taught only in English. The implication is that many researchers and practitioners have different views of what research should achieve. While researchers work to an abstract standard of validity, practitioners are often more interested in truth on a day to day level - what will help me to make sense in my world and be successful?

The Clearinghouse has learned two things from this research. First, the credibility of the research source is important for practitioners, and if the Clearinghouse is to maintain its reputation it has to be careful about the research it distributes. We do have a responsibility to act as a "first line of defense" against bad or incomplete information and to avoid taking sides on issues if it prevents practitioners making their own decisions. Our bibliographies, for example, must continue to represent as many points of view on an issue as possible. The second lesson is that practitioners use research in specific ways, and not all research is suitable for all purposes. At some point it may be helpful to look at the resources we distribute and work out what kind of uses they would be suitable for.

In the end research is meaningless if it is not useful to practitioners. Our aim at the Clearinghouse is always to seek new ways to come together with practitioners and put research to work.