KATIE VALLEJO

RESEARCH PROPOSAL
 What group or community are you thinking of
investigating?
• Students affected by school state exam structure.
• I will collect very simple essays from students and ask them to start an essay and finish in 15-
minute time frame.
• By issuing these essays we can compare them amongst the essays and conclude whether or
not students are still stuck in the way state exams implement a certain view on essays.
What is your • Are student writings affected by State Exam
Structures?
research question?
 Why is this research question important for/to this
group?
• This question is important because these state exams do not let students expand their writing
beyond what they structure and make them memorize. Students must develop research skills that
can be implemented in their future schooling or careers. Putting them in a box literally
and metaphorically impairs them for the future.
• To show this I will include a YouTube video that was used by a teacher to show students the way
they want student's papers to look. That is exactly how I learned to do my essays and now
am stuck doing.
 • I am a student that now struggles to create even
simple one-page essays that don’t look like the
ones we were "trained" in school. I am against the
way schools force these structure and repeated
writings. Also as someone who struggles to write in
Who am I (and english overall sticking to these structure is harder
to get accustomed to and then let go off to learn a
what is my new way all over again.
• "The writing most valued in this binary is a type of
positionality)? writing that is situated in middle-class white
culture. In adhering to so-called correct language,
we are devaluing the non-standard dialects,
cultures, and therefore identities of people and
their communicative situations that do not fit a
highly limited mold. (Pattanayak, 2017)
 • This is important to research because it can become a step to
creating a better if any state exams that actually improve and
encourage student writings and prepare them for the future
Importance/Significance in college.
of Conducting this • "The narrow, prescriptive lens be messin' writers and readers
all the way up, cuz we all been taught to respect the
Research dominant way to write, even if we dont, cant, or wont ever
write that one way ourselves. That be hegemony. Internalized
oppression. Linguistic self-hate" (Young,2010)