NEW DIRECTIONS IN RESEARCH

Funding research in literacy education

erms such as rigorous research, gold standard, scalability, and acceptable researchmethodologies are bandied about in both academic and policy circles, locally as wellas globally. In an effort to learn what meanings these terms might hold for fundingagencies and researchers, we invited four individuals from diverse settings, holdingdiverse points of view, to situate themselves in relation to new directions in fundingresearch in literacy education.

Finbarr C. Sloane, a program director at The National Science Foundation,Division of Research, Evaluation and Communication in Arlington, Virginia,USA, responded by addressing the need for multilevel theory development to sup-port reading interventions brought to scale. Anne McGill-Franzen, professor anddirector of the Reading Center at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, USA,identified what has been left out of the discussion of the concept of scale up and ar-gues for the funding of close-up, focused study of teacher variation within a com-prehensive view of teaching and assessing reading comprehension. Peter Freebodyat the University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia (along with his coauthor,Margery Hornibrook of the Le@rning Federation Curriculum Corporation inMelbourne, Victoria, Australia), cite the need to attend to the challenges presentedto social justice as a core educational principle by constraints in policy and fund-ing. Finally, Andrés Henríquez, a program officer in the education division ofCarnegie Corporation of New York, USA, traces the history of Carnegie’s interestin reading as a way of mapping current and future trends in funding adolescent lit-eracy research. All of the authors offer insights on what it means to be an indepen-dent researcher in an increasingly global and collaborative world.

Donna Alvermann & David Reinking

T

Reading Research QuarterlyVol. 40, No. 3

July/August/September 2005© 2005 International Reading Association

(pp. 360–380)

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