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This manuscript highlights benefits of service-learning (SL) as a promising pedagogical approach to improving teaching and learning in college classrooms. Drawing on the collective experiences of integrating SL projects in university courses, the authors share a framework aimed at assisting faculty in higher education in designing, implementing, and evaluating SL projects across diverse higher education courses. A case example illustrating how SL projects can be infused in a graduate course is offered, and recommendations are provided for faculty who wish to integrate SL projects with the goal of improving teaching and learning in their college courses.

In this study, we revised the "Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory" (MARSI), a self-report instrument designed to assess students' awareness of reading strategies when reading school-related materials. We collected evidence of structural, generalizability, and external aspects of validity for the revised inventory (MARSI-R). We first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis of the MARSI instrument, which resulted in the reduction of the number of strategy statements from 30 to 15. We then tested MARSI-R for factorial invariance across gender and ethnic groups and found that there is a uniformity in student interpretation of the reading strategy statements across these groups, thus allowing for their comparison on levels of metacognitive processing skills. We found evidence of the external validity aspect of MARSI-R data through correlations of such data with a measure of the students' perceived reading ability. Given that this journal is oriented to second language learning and teaching, our article also includes comments on the "Survey of Reading Strategies" (SORS), which was based on the original MARSI and was designed to assess adolescents' and adults' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of ESL reading strategies. We provide a copy of the MARSIR instrument and discuss the implications of the study's findings in light of new and emerging insights relative to assessing students' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies

In this brief report, we share three challenges we encountered when designing and implementing an after school intervention program for an ethnically diverse group of middle grade underachieving readers. We also offer practical solutions to help guide middle school teams in anticipating and addressing potential problems when putting in place literacy interventions in after school settings.

In this exploratory quasi-experimental case study, we assessed the promise of a yearlong supplemental reading intervention with a small pilot group of at-risk first grade readers in an elementary school setting. Using standardized measures of reading proficiency, we found that after 47 hours of one-on-one tutoring instruction, students read significantly more proficiently than did non-tutored students in a matched group of first grade peers in the same school. These results are encouraging in light of literacy research documenting the impact of one-on-one tutoring by qualified tutors of at-risk early grade readers. We used lessons learned from this pilot study to help inform and direct the necessary revisions and refinements of future reading interventions with the goal of building the school's capacity to support the literacy development of at-risk readers so that they can catch up with their typically developing peers.

This study uses 2018 PISA data to explore factors impacting 15-year-old U.S. students' reading performance. It finds teacher experience positively correlates with scores, while attributes like age negatively impact them. Home ICT access boosts achievement, but overabundance of devices proves counterproductive. Ethnicity, parental education, and language crucially determine reading performance, underscoring socio-cultural factors. School context significantly influences outcomes with urban and rural schools facing varied challenges. The study concludes reading proficiency depends on complex factors, emphasizing need for balanced digital resources and interventions to address disparities. Limitations include reliance on single-cycle quantitative data, suggesting more longitudinal research is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examined 5th grade students' levels of vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness relative to their reading comprehension performance. The aim was to explore the contributions of vocabulary and syntactic awareness as potential sources of reading comprehension difficulty for these readers. Overall, we found that both vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness contributed in significant yet unique ways to students' reading comprehension performance. Students who showed weaknesses in vocabulary and syntax also performed poorly on measures of reading comprehension. Additionally, we found that syntactic awareness explained a small amount of additional variance in reading comprehension beyond what was explained by vocabulary. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of research and practice addressing the relationships among syntax, vocabulary, and reading comprehension for more and less skilled readers.

For more than two decades, accommodations have served as the primary strategy for ensuring the valid participation of multilingual learners (MLLs) in high-stakes summative assessments. Using historical analyses of the evolution of testing accommodation guidelines and related instructional practices, the authors explain how the application of accessibility principles to test development and testing guidelines has reframed accommodations into three categories: accommodations, accessibility features, and administration considerations. The authors then discuss what educators can do to more effectively prepare MLLs by integrating these supports into instruction that targets strategic reading and engagement with text and illustrate how the transfer of paper-oriented reading strategies to digital texts requires explicit attention to foster effective use of embedded accommodations and accessibility features. The authors also provide sample professional development activities to build educator awareness about ideas for integrating MLL test preparations around accommodations into close reading instruction of digital texts.

The essays below were prepared following the LRA session organized by Janice Almasi entitled, "Examining the relative contributions of content knowledge and strategic processing to comprehension." What unites these essays are the personal and historical stances that each writer has taken; in addition, the essays are rich with constructive critique of tensions in the conduct of comprehension instruction (e.g., acknowledging and building on readers' sensemaking efforts, while encouraging the development of reading expertise and flexibility). There are redeployments of classic theories (e.g., schema theory) and heuristics (e.g., the interactive model of reading) and the call for new lenses with which to inform scholarship on comprehension. Finally, there are invitations to consider new horizons for comprehension research that take into account contemporary contexts and uses for interpreting and learning from text.

In this study, 935 undergraduate college students from a regional four-year university responded to an online time-diary survey asking them to report their multitasking habits and practices while engaged in four main activities: reading voluntarily for fun, reading for academic purposes, watching television (TV), and using the Internet. Results showed that a majority of the students reported performing two or more tasks simultaneously, switching rapidly back and forth from one task to another. About half of the students also admitted that multitasking interfered with and influenced their ability to focus on core activities, such as reading for academic purposes. These findings have important implications for addressing media multitasking as a growing concern among college students.

In this study, we examined the role of morphology, an important yet largely understudied source of difficulty, in reading ability among 7th grade students in one junior high school in the southwestern United States. We sought to find out how much variance in reading ability is accounted for by these students' morphological knowledge, and whether skilled readers do in fact have higher levels of morphological knowledge than less skilled student peers. We found that students' sensitivity to the morphological structure of words accounted for 18% of the variance in these students' reading performance. We further found that skilled readers had a significantly higher level of sensitivity to the structure of words than did less skilled readers. In light of these findings, we offer recommendations for interpreting and using the results obtained to better understand and scaffold students' morphological knowledge, with the goal of helping promote students' vocabulary growth and reading comprehension performance.

In this quasi-experimental study, we assessed the promise of Word Generation, a research-based academic vocabulary program, on improving the reading achievement outcomes of struggling sixth-grade readers in an after-school small group instructional setting. After 34 hours of academic vocabulary instruction, we compared the performance of a school-identified group of students (n = 36) as needing reading assistance who voluntarily participated in the program to that of a school-recruited comparison group of student peers (n = 36) who did not need reading assistance but participated in a different after-school instructional program. Results show that the vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension performance of intervention students improved significantly after completing 34 hours of academic vocabulary instruction using the Word Generation curriculum. More importantly, intervention students received nearly identical extended scale scores on the Group Reading Assessment & Diagnostic Evaluation test at the end of the intervention when compared to students in the comparison group after adjusting for initial mean differences. These findings indicate that a modest dose of instruction in cross-disciplinary vocabulary instruction can help close the reading achievement gap between skilled and less-skilled sixth-grade readers.

In this article, the authors introduce a data analysis procedure, abbreviated as FAD, to help literacy professionals who work with children in clinical or classroom settings identify and interpret patterns of assessment data with the goal of determining children's literacy strengths and needs. The procedure uses data from multiple literacy assessments to filter out irrelevant information, analyze the relevant information through a systematic process of identifying meaningful and coordinated patterns and relationships, and derive a tentative diagnosis of potential reading and writing difficulties based on outcomes of the analyses. (Contains 2 figures.)

Literature study groups help promote critical thinking and improve reading skills. These groups, in general, are characterized by: (1) a flexible grouping--usually determined by a reader's choice of a given book at a given time; (2) participant-centered dialogue, where the teacher takes on the role of facilitator and expert participant rather than director of discussion; and (3) embeddedness in a strong, meaning-centered curriculum in which learners read and write copiously for real purposes. What makes such engagements particularly well-suited to middle grades learners is that literature studies are highly effective in developing reading ability, knowledge about literature, and critical and analytic thinking (Faust, Cockrill, Hancock, & Isserstedt, 2005). Moreover, they accomplish these things in such a way that students are aware of their own growth. Literature studies provide space for students' voices to be heard, valuing their meanings, concerns, and insights. This article describes research-based approaches to literacy study groups and provides suggestions for implementation.

In this article, the authors suggest that many of the problems struggling readers encounter while reading stem from distinct yet fundamental sources of difficulty related to the types of text read (print or online), the task or activity readers engage in, and the sociocultural context of reading. The authors further argue that although these problems are multidimensional, they can and should be addressed simultaneously. Using a case scenario of a third-grade struggling reader, the authors share guidelines with an example of how her tutor planned, organized, and monitored instruction in a one-on-one tutorial setting--here defined as a setting in which a single teacher or tutor, usually not the classroom teacher, plans and delivers instruction to one student. The authors anticipate that the insights shared will be helpful to professional educators, paraprofessionals, and volunteer or peer tutors who work with struggling readers in similar settings. (Contains 1 figure.)

In this article, the authors present a snapshot of how one kindergarten and Reading Recovery teacher organized instruction in her classroom, enabling her to provide constructively responsive reading assessment and instruction for her developing and struggling readers. (Contains 2 figures.)

In this column, we share the collective reflections of a group of teachers and a school administrator in one Midwestern elementary school, which highlight the value of using data collaboratively to bring about instructional change and to improve student reading achievement.

How much time do college students spend reading for recreational and academic purposes? Do Internet and television use displace or interfere with reading time? In this study, we used an innovative time-diary survey method to explore whether the time students spend on the Internet or watching television displaces time that would be spent reading for academic or recreational purposes. (Contains 9 tables.)

The constantly changing nature of literacy, brought about by the Internet and other forms of information and communication technologies (ICTs), has pressed researchers and practitioners to seek new ways of addressing the complexities of reading comprehension and writing on and with the Internet. In this brief interview, members of the New Literacies Research Lab share valuable insights on the assessment of the new literacies of online reading comprehension.

A carefully coordinated literacy assessment and instruction framework implemented school-wide can support school teams in making sense of various types of data for instructional planning. Instruction that is data based and goal driven sets the stage for continuous reading and writing improvement. (Contains 2 figures.)

In this study, we assessed and analyzed 5th grade students' levels of syntactic awareness in relation to their reading fluency and comprehension. The aim was to examine the role of syntactic awareness (children's awareness of the syntactic structure of sentences and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure) as a potential source of reading fluency and comprehension difficulty for these readers. We found that the students' levels of syntactic awareness were significantly related to their reading fluency (r= 0.625) and reading comprehension performance (r= 0.816). These relationships indicate that lower levels of syntactic awareness correspond to poor reading fluency and poor comprehension among these readers. These findings have important implications for research and instruction addressing the relative contributions of broader language skills to the development of reading fluency and comprehension among struggling readers. (Contains 3 tables and 5 figures.)

This study investigated whether significant differences exist between first and second language readers in their metacognitive awareness and perceived use of specific strategies when reading for academic purposes in English. Three hundred and fifty college students (141 US and 209 Moroccan) completed an instrument designed to measure their metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. The results revealed that despite the fact that the two student groups had been schooled in significantly different socio-cultural environments, they reported remarkably similar patterns of strategy awareness and reported usage when reading academic materials in English. Where differences were found, Moroccan students reported using certain types of strategies more often than did their American counterparts. These findings help to explain some of the differences and similarities between second language readers and those reading in their first language, which have only been seen in terms of deficiencies but not in other, presumably more beneficial or even neutral ways. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)

This study examines the extent to which community college students' learning style preferences vary as a function of discipline. Reports significant differences in students' learning style preferences across disciplines, but not by gender. Adds that student learning style preferences varied by academic performance as measured by gender. Discusses implications for community college teaching and research. (Contains 22 references.) (CB)

Describes development and validation of a new self-report instrument, the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory, designed to assess adolescent and adult readers' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading academic materials. After a brief review of the literature, the development and validation of the instrument are described, and its psychometric properties are discussed. (Author)

Examined the perceptions of preservice elementary teachers enrolled in reading, mathematics, and integrating reading and mathematics methods courses about integrating mathematics, reading, and writing instruction at the elementary/middle school level. Surveys indicated that all students were generally positive about instructional integration. They believed that improving reading skills could lead to better mathematical understanding. (SM)

Compares writing products of 60 third-grade students who drew before writing a story to writing products of 59 students who wrote without drawing. Finds that students who drew produced more words and overall wrote better than nondrawers. Notes that results were consistent for boys and girls regardless of group membership. (PA)

There is a delicate balance between the assessment of learning and assessment for learning. The recommendations included in this Assessment department may be useful for teachers working to achieve this balance and find a more accurate and complete understandings of students' literacy strengths and needs.

Portfolio development is a viable alternative to standardized tests in evaluating students' as well as preservice teachers' skills and achievements. These portfolios serve as records of progress and thereby assist in the formulation of additional educational goals and objectives and assist in the performance appraisal and eventual placement of preservice teachers. Portfolio assessment, however, should not be undertaken simply to facilitate administrative mandates but rather, to enhance learning and teaching.

A look at the challenge pose by science texts to inexperienced and struggling readers is presented. Many educators have proposed that content-area teachers insert reading strategies into their content instruction. However, research shows that science reading also requires discipline-specific background knowledge in order to reliably predict text comprehension.