Year of Award
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Arts (MA)
Degree Name
Education
Other Degree Name/Area of Focus
Teaching and Learning
Department or School/College
Phyllis J. Washington College of Education
Committee Chair
Kate Brayko
Commitee Members
Jingjing Sun, Jeff Ross
Keywords
literacy, identity, science of reading, structured literacy, mixed methods, case study
Subject Categories
Elementary Education | Language and Literacy Education
Abstract
Although the act of reading is inherently multi-faceted, encompassing an array of interrelated cognitive, social, and cultural processes, the bodies of reading research typically align to either qualitative or quantitative methodologies. This routinely bifurcated approach to reading research reflects the ongoing disagreement surrounding best practices for literacy instruction. Numerous quantitative findings have supported the use of systematic and explicit foundational skill instruction to improve students’ reading proficiency. On the other hand, previous qualitative studies have emphasized the existing identities that children bring to any learning community and the benefit of nurturing literate identity formation in the classroom. Intersecting a modified mixed-methods parallel convergent design within an overarching case study methodology, I (1) investigate the impact of foundational reading skill interventions on rural, second-grade students’ reading proficiency in terms of reading rate, accuracy, and other embedded diagnostic measures, (2) explore how these same children articulate and depict specific dimensions of their literate identities through semi-structured interviews and artifacts, and (3) examine how these children’s reading proficiency trajectories intersect with their evolving literate identities. My findings reveal two distinct proficiency trajectories among study participants in this rural community and support previous quantitative insights about the effectiveness of explicit and systematic decoding and orthography instruction. My findings simultaneously yield several qualitative trends, including (1) children’s growing awareness of their own reading preferences, (2) children’s enduring tendency to frame reading as a social experience, (3) an increasingly expansive array of emotional responses to reading, and (4) diverging perceptions of self-efficacy according to reading proficiency trajectory. The present study suggests that constructs of self-efficacy and motivation predictably converge with reading proficiency growth profiles, whereas it surprisingly reveals that constructs such as reading preferences, beliefs about reading, and emerging expressions of empathy are capable of transcending one’s reading proficiency. This study confirms the importance of exploring reading development as a complex, multidimensional set of processes in service of honoring and nurturing our young learners as readers.
Recommended Citation
Olsen, Ashley R. S., "Examining Rural Second-Graders' Literate Identities in Relationship to Reading Proficiency: A Mixed Methods Case Study" (2025). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12512.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12512
© Copyright 2025 Ashley R. S. Olsen