Truthfulness and Research

For my literature review on strategies and reflections on engaging boys in literacy activities, I read a few articles by Debby Zambo. One of the articles I used was entitled, "Using Picture Books and Literacy Activities to Help Young Boys Develop Literacy Skills and Positive Traits". This article was helpful when I was crafting my literature review, but I did notice a few issues regarding truthfulness and credibility.

First and foremost, the writer was also the teacher in this article. She even states that based on her experience as a teacher of young boys she believes that boys flourish when reading books with positive male protagonists and use her three- step process. It's possible that because Zambo is using her methods and students there could be issues of bias and researcher influence.

Second, the premise of the study is that Zambo will select books with positive male role models, then read and delve into the character's traits through conversation and then finally transfer the traits by using literacy activities that encourage the boys to model the traits from the aforementioned book.

The article ends by including examples of what literacy activities the various boys practiced and how the character trait was modeled. For example, one student learned about responsibility and participated in Reader's Theater for which he was responsible for the script. Other students practiced traits such as honesty by not cheating during a vocabulary game and positive self-esteem by working with a reading buddy. However, one can argue that because there was no specific code for these behaviors and no other researchers involved who could participate in intercoder reliability or blind coding there is a lack of validity in this study. Also, it is not mentioned whether Zambo did a member check with the participants in the study.

Overall, although I did like the theory and structure presented in the article, this study definitely could be strengthen by studying a different teacher practice the methods, adding a level of coding and establishing intercoder reliability and by doing a member check or even an external audit (if the participant is young) to find out whether the traits are truly embodied by the participant through Zambo's three step process.