Dissertating

I'm pretty excited about my dissertation, which is a good thing and I hope this excitement continues and sustains me through the upcoming months and years when I get sick of it. When I was doing my MA Thesis on creative nonfiction in composition, several people warned me against doing something I was really passionate about because, they said, I would eventually come to hate it. Well, that didn't happen, though there were definitely times I didn't like the thesis process.

Anyway, here is my idea:

Earlier this year, two researchers began to study high schools and colleges across the country, looking for information about what writing is taught at different levels, etc. The HS I work at was one of the three HS to participate (interesting why they couldn't get more schools on board- a lot of schools didn't want to know the findings) and so they did a survey of our students and faculty and collected writing and assignment samples. When I went to hear them speak a a conference, someone in the audience suggested they do a longitudinal study of the HS kids they initially surveyed. Inside my head I was shouting "I'm doing that!" So, what I want to do is follow a number of graduates from the HS I work at through their first year of college.

Unlike the Harvard, Stanford, and now University of Denver longitudinal studies about college writing, my constant is not the college the students go to, but the fact they are all coming from the same HS. They will go to a variety of colleges, and so what I want to know is:

*How do they use/mis use/ not use what they learned about both reading and writing in HS in their first year of college?

*What do they learn their first year of college, in terms of reading and writing, that they wished they'd learned in high school?

*If the HS/College gap exists like the faculty say it does, how do they HS graduates feel about that as they navigate their first year?

In order to provide the framework to answer these questions, I definitely want to look at the cognitive theories of "skills transfer" or "knowledge transfer" as well as the literature on the HS/College gap (as it pertains to literacy). Those are my two lit review starting points, but I fully expect for the exploding world of research to carry me off into many other areas as I go along.