How Students Made Sense of Traditional Literacy Compared with Online Literacy Practices

 a secondary school student. After the pairs of
Thirteen science and 11 mathematics preservicepreservice teachers finished, we debriefed as a
teachers in the senior year of a five-year teachergroup. In the next three weeks, the preservice
education program completed a semester-longteachers conducted their investigations and wrote
science and mathematics teaching methods coursetheir analysis papers.
taught by the authors. These secondary preservice 
teachers were concurrently taking a practician in localThe traditional print task, reproduced in Figure 1,
middle and high schools. This content methods courseconsisted of a paragraph of informational text and a
precedes a semester-long student teachingline graph illustrating the relationship described in the
experience. All preservice teachers participated in thistext. The content of the task appropriated features
assignment and granted their permission for us tocommon to science and mathematics texts but was,
examine their reports for this study; all names used inin terms of factual content, nonsensical. The major
reporting results are pseudonyms.claim of the paragraph is that change in global
 temperature is related to the decreasing number of
The assignment was to investigate how secondarypirates in the world. This text was selected to see
school students made sense of traditional literacyhow students coordinated the information in the
practices compared with online literacy practices. Weparagraph and the line graph. In addition, the text
use traditional literacies to denote practicesmade problematic use of correlation to argue a causal
associated with reading and comprehension of printclaim, and the graph contained a number of
text and new literacies to denote those practicesinaccuracies. In the Internet task, we were curious to
associated with online reading and comprehension.see what challenges Thomas Sabo Bracelets students
The assignment was to Thomas Sabo conductencountered as they searched for information (e.g.,
think-aloud protocols with practicum students as theyhow and where search strategies broke down). The
engaged with a traditional literacy task that consistedfirst part of the investigation had the preservice
of a paragraph of informational text and anteachers ask the students to think aloud while
associated line graph and with a new literacies taskreading the print text about pirates and global
that asked the student to use the Internet to findwarming; the second part had the students think
additional information related to the text and graph.aloud while using the Internet to answer the
During these two tasks, the preservice teachersquestion, How might pirates affect global warming.
took field notes and recorded what students said 
and did. The preservice teachers then wrote a three-We drew upon the 24 preservice teachers' analysis
to five-page analysis paper of their work withpapers and our own reflective notes and memos
students.written as we conducted this work. We used
 inductive coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994) as we
To scaffold our preservice teachers' abilities tolooked systematically at the reports using qualitative
productively investigate the student literacy practices,data analysis software. We found that the papers
we modeled using the tasks during the methodscontained patterns for how students and preservice
classes. First, we showed them how to conduct theteachers view content-specific literacy practices.
think-aloud using a paragraph different from the textThese patterns formed the basis for our identification
used in the assignment. Then the preservice teachersof the three types of discursive metaknowledge we
worked in pairs to do the tasks, one taking the roledescribe next.
of the investigator and the other playing the role of