Teachers in any discipline where reading matters should practice a robust scaffolding pedagogy to teach critical reading, in contrast to the more common but less direct approaches that often leave students to learn or not learn these skills themselves. In this essay, I describe how to adapt established methods for teaching writing (including…

"Using Sentiment Analysis to Ease Students toward or around Macroanalysis" introduces teachers to the mathematical analytical method currently being promoted by Matthew Jockers which he calls macroanalysis. This method uses an algorithm called "R," originally designed by researchers in sociology. In many ways, macroanalysis…

While educators believe reading is an investment in learning and knowing, what many are not considering is what reading analytically means to civic life in the digital age when many of the old gatekeepers of traditional publishing are disappearing. As new voices have emerged, and there is an explosion of reading material, there is also less…

Proficient writers spend substantial time planning for writing, and that planning begins with analyzing the writing task. They spend time considering the topic, the audience and its needs, and the genre and form of the writing. This rhetorical analysis helps them set goals, orient their attention, and get organized. Task analysis can also help…

This article uses Zak Lancaster's 2016 discovery that academics do not actually write the way "They Say/I Say" says they do to reflect on relations between, on the one hand, facts about academic writing and, on the other, the pedagogical values that underlie and guide those facts--or, put another way, to reflect on how values we may…

Internet users worldwide turn to Wikipedia, the web-based, open-content encyclopedia, for basic information on all subjects. There is much to concern an academic audience in the encyclopedia's prominence: bases for evidence are different from those used by scholars; no expertise is required to edit an article; the site is a target for…

With the Internet-evoked paradigm shift in the academy, there has been a growing interest in students' Web-based information-seeking and source-use practices. Nevertheless, little is known as to how individual students go about searching for sources online and selecting source material for writing particular assignments. This exploratory study…

This article describes a unique course-based collaboration involving an English professor, a Learning Strategies Counselor, and a Librarian. The potential benefits and barriers of collaborative teaching in literature are reviewed. The article delineates a three-way instruction model built around an annotated bibliography assignment in a…

Using a reading lesson designed for advanced university students in Brazil, the author discusses different types of exercises that can help students become more active readers and be more critical about the reading materials. The author distinguishes between passive and active reading tasks and argues that active tasks are more beneficial because…