Academically underprepared postsecondary students make up a large proportion of college campuses. Recent estimates indicate that up to 70 percent of incoming students at two-year community colleges and up to 40 percent of incoming students at four-year colleges enroll in developmental courses. There has been some criticism of the effectiveness of…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore in-service teachers' first experiences with imaginary dialogues -- a form of mathematical writing where students are introduced to a written and unfinished dialogue between two imaginary persons discussing a mathematical problem. Students are supposed to continue working with the problem and to…

Although written communication is a foundational skill, especially for careers in management, faculty can be reluctant to utilize writing assignments for a number of reasons including the subjective nature of and time involved in grading. In this article, we present the IDEAL framework--an andragogical tool developed in an effort to address these…

This paper reports on a collaborative project aimed at addressing the learning challenges faced by non-traditional students at the interface of TAFE and Higher Education. Our pedagogy is informed by engagement with a critique of competency-based education that espouses "bringing knowledge back into" the curriculum (Wheelahan, 2010a) and a critique…

The theme for the 59th annual conference of the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers was Making a Difference in Our Diverse Communities. The meeting took place in Costa Mesa, California in 2015. In the first section of the Yearbook, Dr. J. Helen Perkins's presidential address shared the story of her journey as an educator and how it…

Academic writing, especially the writing of research articles, dissertations and theses, is often viewed in the literature as "writing up". It is as if first comes the research, an active creation of new knowledge, and then comes the writing, a relatively passive assembling of what has already been achieved. It is as if researching and…

This study examined how content area teachers' literacy knowledge developed during a yearlong professional development initiative focused on using the framework of Question-Answer Relationships (QAR) within explicit instruction. The initiative focused on the metacognitive thinking in which teachers engage during QAR instruction. The participating…

Using a science lesson on lunar phases as a basis for discussion, the author suggests ways that teachers can provide literacy instruction on multimodal texts in science. The author asserts that multiple representations are central to the discipline of science, and that students require explicit instruction on how to critically read, evaluate, and…

The progress and effects of a collaborative study group as a method of job-embedded professional development were studied. Eight high school teachers representing a variety of disciplines and the author (a literacy specialist) met monthly as a collaborative group for one school year to investigate materials and methods for literacy strategy…

This annual newsletter contains updates on the latest CCRC research, new publications and details of upcoming presentations at major conferences. The feature article in this issue, "Addressing the Needs of Underprepared Students," by Thomas Bailey, summarizes the discussion found in the paper "Challenge and Opportunity: Rethinking…

The integrative literature review is a distinctive form of research that generates new knowledge about the topic reviewed. Little guidance is available on how to write an integrative literature review. This article discusses how to organize and write an integrative literature review and cites examples of published integrative literature reviews…

The Online Academy (HO29K73002) was funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to develop research-based online instructional modules in the content areas of reading, positive behavior support and technology across the curriculum. Targeted to preservice teacher education programs in Institutions of Higher Education (IHE), but also…

The title of the twenty-eighth yearbook mirrors the theme of the 2005 conference--"Learning in the 21st Century with Traditional and Electronic Literacies." The editors chose the title "Multiple Literacies in the 21st Century" in an attempt to reflect the contents of this yearbook which seem to approach literacy from a myriad…