Reading engagement is an essential component of children's reading achievement. This three-chapter dissertation considers a new approach to conceptualizing reading engagement through the lens of children's immersion, or absorption, in a text. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical underpinnings of story world absorption, sometimes known as…

A reader's ability to go beyond their surface-level understanding of words and to build a deeper representation of the text in their mind (i.e., reading comprehension) is predicated on a range of reader- and text-level variables that indicate how well a certain reader can read a certain text. The following study evaluates the extent to which the…

This naturalistic basic interpretive inquiry study investigated what individual and social meanings students constructed while engaging with paired picture books presented in two different languages: One in English and the other in Arabic. The research aimed to uncover how middle grade male students interpreted and comprehended the narratives and…

The purpose of this study is to determine if there is a relationship between oral narrative production and the reading comprehension of expository text. The research questions are: (1) What is the relationship between oral narrative production and reading comprehension of expository text in fifth-grade students?; (2) Which components of oral…

This dissertation chronicled a multifaceted study utilizing the Historical, Philosophical, Societal and a Takeaway (HPST) Framework, an organizational tool used for document analysis. Utilizing a case study format, this research unpacked how a charter school teacher used HPST within her own ninth grade Advanced Placement World History class. As a…

Reading comprehension deficits are common for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and the rise in prevalence of this disorder has resulted in an increased demand for evidence-based strategies for teaching reading comprehension to this population. Research has found an increase in desired behaviors when a restricted interest (RI) or…

This qualitative research study examined the connections made by refugee and immigrant youth to a teacher proposed mirror text at an elementary ESL book group. Mirror texts, or books in which youth with marginalized identities can see themselves reflected, have been argued to promote text connections and reading comprehension for minoritized…

Across one school year, in which I coached a fourth-grade teacher, she and I took an inquiry stance investigating how we could come to understand the reading identities kids held relative to Stephens' (2013) list of characteristics of effective and efficient readers. We also sought to understand how we could help kids develop, sustain, or extend…

There is great concern in the scientific community that students in the United States, when compared with other countries, are falling behind in their scientific achievement. Increasing students' reading comprehension of scientific text may be one of the components involved in students' science achievement. To investigate students'…

This study examined how the interactive features of eBooks affect comprehension, the behaviors that participants engage in during the Read-to-Me and Read-and-Play reading modes, and the affordances and constraints of these reading modes. A repeated measures design was used to analyze the reading behaviors of 30 second grade, lower-level readers…

A societal shift from print-based to digital texts has afforded the ability to embed reader support within an instructional text. Numerous factors make eBooks an attractive option for colleges and universities, though undergraduates consistently reaffirm a preference for print-based materials. Given that many undergraduates arrive to college with…

Students living in poverty continually score significantly lower than their more affluent peers on reading and writing achievement tests. One reason this literacy difference or gap may exist is a mismatch between students' background knowledge relevant to the text and the texts the students read daily in classrooms. It is well documented that…

In an effort to find evidence of the effectiveness of an accommodation which students with reading based disabilities are allowed to use on state assessments, a group of 11 fifth graders identified as having a reading based disability and having at least one reading goal in their Individual Education Programs (IEP) were given a series of short…

The Read Aloud strategy is uniquely suitable for the preschool classroom. On the peripheral, the Read Aloud is a natural, relaxed activity. With the increase of accountability and assessments in formal education (Meier, 2003), it has become more crucial for educators to prevent interruptions in the acquisition of emergent skills by preschoolers.…

Adults are able to access semantic and syntactic information rapidly as they hear or read in real-time in order to interpret sentences. Young children, on the other hand, tend to rely on syntactically-based parsing routines, adopting the first noun as the agent of a sentence regardless of plausibility, at least during oral comprehension. Little is…