Ready for What?: A Longitudinal Investigation of Eleven "College-Ready" Students' Disciplinary Literacy Learning Experiences from High School into College

Abstract

Resounding calls for reform in K-12 education in the service of “college readiness” have become all but ubiquitous. The K-12 standards-based and literacy reform efforts have urged for teaching and learning that advances the practices and inquiry approaches within and across disciplines—called disciplinary literacy learning— which seeks to replace generic approaches to reading and writing instruction that lacks attention to domain-specific practices and skills. Despite these reform efforts and advancements in K-12 teaching and learning, little is known of what students will encounter academically once they enroll in colleges and universities. This begs the question “ready for what?”— what academic and literacy learning experiences do students encounter once in college and how do students navigate these experiences?

This study investigates the experiences of eleven “college-ready” students from their junior years of high school through their first two years of college. I investigated the nature of the teaching and learning from their high school years, which resulted in these students meeting every commonly used metric of college readiness. Then, I followed the students to seven different institutions of higher education to document their learning experiences and how they navigated these demands.

Data sources included 76 hours of audio recorded interviews along with numerous (over 1,400) academic artifacts, syllabi, exams, assessments, presentations, and “daily diaries” to analyze the nature of the academic learning experiences in high school and college. I used constant comparative analysis to identify the patterns among students, their courses, and across time.

In high school, I found that these eleven students experienced disciplinary literacy learning and inquiry regularly within and across courses. This involved the use of disciplinary texts, the use of problem frames, inquiry cycles, and engagement in the practices of the disciplines. Students were encouraged to pursue topics of interest and were positioned as novice apprentices learning alongside their teachers and classmates in “communities of practice.” In contrast to the disciplinary literacy learning and apprenticeship-style of teaching that occurred in high school, once in college, these eleven students experienced a preponderance of telling and testing across domains and courses. Students’ main academic activities involved taking exams following lecture-style teaching. Especially within the natural sciences and social sciences, students reported that spaces and courses that may have been considered collaborative or for disciplinary practices (discussion sections; lab-based courses) also became additional spaces for lecture-style teaching and exams.

When students did encounter rare opportunities for disciplinary literacy learning in college, students expressed feelings of confusion and difficulty. I found that this confusion often stemmed from a lack of scaffolding and support for students. However, these students leveraged their backgrounds and skills to navigate these confusing experiences by seeking additional information from professors and teaching assistants.

Together, the findings of this study suggest that K-12 education reform efforts are encouraging students to develop particular dispositions and skills within and across domains. In contrast, college teaching and learning seems to be dominated (at least in the first two years of college) by a pedagogy of telling and testing. This study serves as a warning that even “college-ready” students encountered regular confusion, difficulties, and even boredom during college. This study holds implications for the use of a disciplinary literacy learning framework in college in order to improve access, support, and relevance for all learners.