The advent of technology has made the Internet a fertile ground for much literacy learning to take place, and how to use the Internet discourse for language learning remains to be explored. The current study adopted a language-awareness approach to raise students' awareness of the forms and function of online language. A sample online comment…

Since 2013, the Notice and Note signposts have become an increasingly popular method of teaching close reading strategies, yet little research has been conducted to evaluate whether the signposts are more or less effective in improving reading comprehension and critical thinking skills than other close reading methods. The study attempted to…

Undergraduate research experiences are excellent opportunities to engage students in science alongside experienced scientists, but at large institutions, it is challenging to accommodate all students. To address and engage a larger number of students, we developed a modular laboratory course based on the course-based undergraduate research…

Due to the Common Core State Standards, close reading is becoming a common practice in today's elementary and middle school classrooms. Qualitative content analysis of journal publications was used to determine the (a) prevalence of close reading in the existing literature, (b) knowledge about close reading from the research literature, (c) themes…

Critical literacy works to make readers aware of the explicit and implicit ideologies present in texts. Engaging in critical reading helps readers recognize and interrogate ideologies in texts in order to be more informed readers. This action research study examined the development of critical literacy skills in 19 prospective elementary teachers…

The goal of this study was to assess the effectiveness of 2 different types of intervention aimed at improving written argumentative synthesis by integrating conflicting information from different sources. Both interventions combined the use of a guide with collaborative practice, but one of them also included explicit strategy instruction. Only…

The focus of this article is a nine-month long practice-led research (PLR) project. As part of this project, the author developed a cross-curricular program as part of a middle-school humanities course in order to facilitate student discussion. The program, which the students and author dubbed "BlogArt," began as a writing- and…

The Common Core State Standards have placed more emphasis on the close reading of all texts, and have made a point of increasing the use of nonfiction in secondary English classrooms. In this article, the author describes an approach for implementing close reading of literary nonfiction. The approach comes from a small-scale classroom-based…

With the massive amounts of conflicting information and opinion bombarding us from all sides today, it has never been more important to teach young people to suspend judgment, to weigh evidence, and to consider multiple perspectives. Teaching students the craft of argument writing--not only in language arts classes, but also in social studies,…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of critical reading (CR) practices in science courses on academic achievement, science performance level, and problem-solving skills. The experimental method and factorial design were used. The study was conducted with 102 seventh-grade students from a public school in Turkey during the 2014-2015 academic…

Purpose: Scholars who advocate for equity-oriented educational practices have argued that the accountability era in the USA, now in place for two decades, has failed in its intended goal to improve student performance for traditionally marginalized student populations. This study aims to use a sociocultural lens to trace how a century-old…

Reading critically involves examining the language choices authors make to "get the job done" -- in other words, to communicate effectively in specific ways with particular audiences. Not all students in middle and high school intuit this type of reading and may experience challenges when they go to write for academic purposes. Their…

For the past 20 years, Dr. Jack Cassidy and his collaborators have surveyed leaders in the field about the issues in literacy that are receiving attention and those that are no longer in the limelight and presented the findings in the annual "What's Hot, What's Not" column. This tradition has continued into 2017 as 25 literacy leaders…

In the course of conducting two SoTL studies on the benefits and challenges of using e-books in place of paper books, the authors have refined and are sharing in this report a handful of best practices to enhance the development of critical reading. The courses that investigated were small, upper-level reading-intensive courses in Philosophy, but…

Background: Young people with intellectual disability (ID) are becoming frequent Internet users, but they present difficulties selecting reliable Internet sources. Methods: The present authors tested an instructional programme aimed at increasing skills to evaluate information from the Internet of 33 young adult students with intellectual…