Summary of "Speak: The Effect of Literary Instruction on Adolescents’ Rape Myth Acceptance”

   Victor Malo-Juvera asks whether participation in a literary unit based on the young adult novel Speak could lower adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, is a young adult novel that details the aftermath of a date rape survived by a girl, Melinda, who is raped the summer before her freshman year. The story is told in Melinda’s point of view and illustrates the impact this assault has had on her emotionally and behaviorally. A rape myth is an idea like “She wanted it,” to account for sexual assault. Among the background data presented by the researchers, many of these myths are accepted by college students, so this rape myth rhetoric is said to begin as early as students’ time in middle school. Using researcher-created questions, along with actual Rape Myth Acceptance Scales, the treatment groups engages in a five-week reader-response study of the novel, while the control group studies Shakespeare.  The students take a pre-test and post-test to measure the level of their rape myth level acceptance to see if studying the novel in an authentic, empathetic way influences students’ attitudes toward rape.

Question/Problem: Do students who participate in the novel unit exhibit lower rape myth acceptance than students who do not?

Source (Book, Journal..): Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 48 , No. 4, May 2014 pp. 407-427

Theoretical or Study-Based:  Quantitative

Study Description: Number of participants: Participants were 139 eighth-grade students with 74 boys and 65 girls. Participants ranged in age from 13 to 17 years. 73 were Latino, 48 were African American, 8 were European American, 4 were Caribbean and 2 were Native American. 2 students were other ethnicities (413). Length of study:  The study took place “the third quarter of the school year and lasted 5 school weeks” (414). “The Speak unit lasted 5 weeks and consisted of 12 classes (each lasting 1 hour and 45 minutes) held every other school day” (415). Measurement Tool: Pretests and posttests measured the students’ rape myth acceptance. In addition to researcher-created question, “This study used two inventories to measure pretest rape myth acceptance: the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (RMAS; Burt, 1980) and the Adolescent Rape Myth Scale (ARMS)” (415). Setting:  A large school district in the southeastern United States at a Title 1 middle school with 8th grade ELA tracks in language arts, advanced language arts, or inclusion language arts. The free/reduced lunch rate for the school where the study was conducted was about 85% (413). Research Design:  The study took place in two teachers’ classrooms and “used an experimental pretest-posttest design with a wait-list control group. A convenience sample of seven 8th-grade classes was randomly assigned” the treatment group or the control group. “Immediately after posttests, all participants attended a dating violence workshop conducted by the school’s counselor. The workshop was conducted after posttests in order to partition the effect of the literary unit from any attitudinal changes caused by the workshop. During the treatment’s group instruction of the novel unit, the teachers used reader-response activities and small group discussion to foster authentic and empathetic engagement from the students. “Students in the control group (n = 57) participated in a concurrent 5-week instructional Unit on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that used similar instructional methods” (416).

Findings: 1. Analysis of the pretests “found that girls… had significantly lower… pretest rape myth acceptance than boys” (416). 2. “Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was significant…the intervention was successful in lowering rape myth acceptance for students in the treatment group versus those in the control group” (417). 3. “The findings suggest that treatment was effective not only in avoiding a backlash, but also in significantly reducing rape myth acceptance in boys with high pretest rape myth acceptance” (418). 4. “Results reveal that the effect size for She Wanted It was three times larger than the effect size for She Lied, indicating that even though treatment significantly reduced adherence to both constructs of rape myth acceptance, it was more effective in reducing beliefs that rape survivors desire their victimization than it was in dispelling beliefs that girls who report rape fabricate their accusations” (418).

Implications: 1.  “It is possible that a fictional young adult novel gave students a shared experience that they could discuss more freely than they could actual events” and this might not have been the case if the teacher had used more traditional teacher-centered methods for teaching literature rather than the reader-response approach (420). 2. “While the effect of treatment on boys was slightly more prominent, the fact that boys had significantly higher levels of pretest rape myth acceptance provided them with more room to show improvement;” however, it is also likely in our culture that males engage in conversation about this topic less frequently than girls and so this mindful introduction to rape mythology provided the boys with insights beyond their experience (420). 3. “This intervention may have avoided the backlash found in previous studies (Jaffe et al., 1992) due to: (a) the reading, which allowed students to vicariously experience the aftereffects of a date rape through a primarily aesthetic reading transaction; (b) the instruction, which engaged the students in reader response–based dialogic instruction; and/or (c) the duration of this intervention,” and I also think it’s notable to think about the students relationship with their teacher and other students in the classroom. (421). In order to talk about rape in the classroom, there must be a strong culture of respect and compassion, which obviously the teacher and students had cultivated before beginning the unit. I don’t think such growth would have been seen otherwise. 4. This study also enters into an important conversation about English language arts pedagogy. For example, it challenges Common Core architect David Coleman’s infamous statement that “people really don’t give a shit about what you [students] feel or what you think” (421).