When Pandora’s Box Is Opened: A Qualitative Study of the Intended and Unintended Impacts Of Wyoming’s New Standardized Tests on Local Educators’ Everyday Practices

In the context of a newly adopted statewide assessment system, PAWS (Proficiency Assessment for Wyoming Students), this paper describes intended instructional changes and unintended outcomes in classrooms and schools as a result of an assessment policy involving an innovative online portion of the test. An elementary school was selected and prolonged qualitative fieldwork with in - depth and focus group interviews were conducted for 1½ years. A constant comparative data analysis and interpretation from grounded theory methodology led to the following themes: adaptive implementation policy, teachers’ dilemmas, instructional change, and school culture change. While observing an elusive role for teachers that involved external accountability factors, researchers also found a practical hope for future PAWS tests, foreshadowing the need for promptly delivered test results for realistic instructional improvement

Home Literacy Initiatives of Middle School Families During the 2020 Quarantine Period: Transformation in Education?

The coronavirus pandemic changed everything almost overnight for students and their families. The purpose of this qualitative case study, thus, was to investigate the views of families about the sudden change in education for their middle school children, particularly literacy practices, during the pandemic. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of cultural capital, coupled with socioeconomic status, funds of knowledge, and crisis management, we conducted interviews with 4 parents. Using the in vivo coding data analysis method, we identified some key preliminary findings: all-day-happy-hour, the strange disconnection between teachers and parents, and soft and hard approaches to school-home literacy. Participants revealed very distinctive dispositions to make this “school-home” education work on their own. These parental dispositions and new meaning-making from their children’s education developed into what we referred to as parentagogy, as they determined for themselves the skills they would need and use to help their children succeed in their new roles as parent and educator. This study confirms the importance of parental value in education

Integrating Language Diversity into Teacher Education Curricula: Teacher Candidates\u27 Developmental Perspectives and Understandings

This study took place at the University of Wyoming, located in the rural mountain West. The University of Wyoming, with approximately 13,000 students, is the only four-year university in the state.The teacher education population of the College of Education is about 600, and demographically, this population is about 90% White, predominately female, and from rural communities across the state and other states that border Wyoming. Likewise, most school districts in the state of Wyoming are less diverse (ethnically, racially, and linguistically) than the national averages. Given this context, the College of Education has tried to address issues of diversity at the program level over the last decade or so. The inclusion of topics related to issues of diversity in education has been evident in many courses across different departments in the College. Still, most of these efforts were largely made at the course level, as opposed to being made collaboratively at the program level to assure a continuity of diversity components across courses

“Validity in Qualitative Research Revisited”: 14 Years Later, A Continuing Dialogue

As always, concerns with the issues of validity in qualitative research have lingered. An impactful and well-received article that addresses these concerns is “Validity in Qualitative Research Revisited” (Cho & Trent, 2006). It has been cited over 1200 times in Google Scholars. It starts with a traditional approach to the validity of qualitative research which involves determining the degree to which researchers’ claims about knowledge correspond to the reality (or research participants’ construction of reality) being studied. After reviewing the then literature on qualitative research, the authors categorize and label two emerging approaches, ‘transactional’ validity and ‘transformational’ validity, and they suggest that neither approach was sufficient in meeting the then current needs of the field. As a result, a recursive, process-oriented view of validity as an alternative framework was proposed. 14 years have passed since then, and the field of qualitative research has continued to grow, shift, move forward (and, perhaps, backward a bit in some sense), dramatically evolve, and become (more) complicated, contested, and challenged. This paper is an attempt by one of the authors to re-revisit this article in order to critically reflect on the continuing concerns with the issues of validity through recent literatures and developments, in the hopes of re-validating the importance of theorizing and practicing a ‘holistic validity’ across the board