Reaching Across the High School-College Divide to Represent the Other: A Meta-Analysis of the Literature

Starting from the question of how high school and college writing teachers and teacher educators understand and represent what happens in each others\u27 spaces, this meta-analysis establishes a baseline taxonomy of the ways in which we cross the divide. Combing through literature published in representative high school and college English professional journals since the introduction of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in 2010, this analysis finds five thematic clusters of how writing instructors understand and represent each other across the high school-college divide: (a) document analysis of the CCSS and the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing; (b) studies of the efficacy of standardized high school exams in predicting students’ performance in college writing; (c) discussions of autobiographical literacy narratives and biographical case studies of student writers over time; (d) reconnaissance studies in which researchers gather information from and ask questions of their high school/college counterparts; and (e) descriptions of collaborations orchestrated across high school and college sites