This paper investigates the impact of assignment to the Accelerating Literacy for Adolescents (ALFA) Lab, an additional semester-long class taken during an elective period, on ninth grade student reading achievement, motivation, and frequency. We conducted a regression discontinuity (RD) study where 1,378 students from diverse high schools in four…

Purpose: Research on nonschool settings suggests young people benefit from digital multimodal composition. Less is known about how digital composing can support students as they interpret required literary class texts. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of digitally composing for literary analysis, design interviews with two high…

Despite the value of reading, research documents declining reading rates among American adolescents - a decline that exacerbates student dropout rates and academic performance. As a high school English teacher in a public, regional, suburban school, increasing the number of students who deeply read the assigned texts for class has been a…

This case study explored the relationship between levels of content choice in three high school online English language arts courses and evidence of student motivation in student work and students' thoughts about motivation. These courses were designed around the main components of Self-Determination Theory (autonomy, competence, relatedness) and…

In comparison with younger children, older students tend to be less motivated to read. A literature class that fails to motivate students is one aspect that has often been discussed in this regard. Using data from 405 German ninth graders, we examined how students' book reading is related to intrinsic situational and intrinsic habitual reading…

Inspired by a recognition of high school students' frequent disengagement during reading and their lack of comfort and confidence with finding ways to engage with texts, the purpose of this research was to examine the impact of social-media formatted low-stakes writing tasks in the high school English classroom. Drawing from research on writing…

The transition from high school to college is challenging for many students, especially first-generation college students. College courses require disciplinary specific reading, writing, and thinking skills not often taught in high school, such as reading and analyzing complex texts and constructing original arguments in discipline-specific…

Assessing Opportunities to Learn (OTL) implies the measurement of different aspects of the curricular implementation in the classrooms, such as the contents that the teacher selects for the course and the time of exposure and the frequency of the tasks proposed. Based on recent studies that demonstrate the influence of this curricular dimension on…

This paper challenges the reductive notion of children as "efferent" readers who learn to decode written language in order to "take away" knowledge. This anachronistic idea has become entrenched in current UK curriculum and education policy. However, it is well established that decoding letters and sounds is only one aspect of…

The present study investigated vocabulary acquisition through a commercial digital video game compared to a traditional pencil-and-paper treatment. Chosen through cluster sampling, 241 male high school students (age 12-18) participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to one of the following groups. The first group, called Readers,…

The present study aims at identifying the current practices regarding the implementation of extensive reading in Omani public schools. The study employed a content analysis sheet to analyze the extensive reading work of 300 students. Semi-structured interviews were also held with 15 teachers and 5 regional supervisors from Al-Dakhilyia…

This article discusses one teacher's efforts to give their students a mentor text for a persuasive, research-based writing project. The author's shift from assigning predominantly fiction to focusing more on nonfiction came as a result of their efforts to help their students move from students' current writing style -- that of a five-paragraph…

Scholarly scientific literature conveys epistemological assumptions scientists operate on. Popular scientific literature and instructional science texts deviate in their portrayal of science from these epistemological assumptions. Thus, scholarly scientific literature holds more potential for improving students' epistemological understanding…

The arrival of the Common Core State Standards changed the landscape of teacher preparation for many teacher education programs by highlighting the importance of growing students as readers, writers, and communicators. This study focuses on the instructional literacy practices of preservice teachers enrolled in a co-taught course with a literacy…

This author describes a reading project using Kindles that was designed to increase the reading habits of 9th graders. With a selection of 500 titles for classroom usage, students were encouraged to read any book they chose--in addition to those required for their school term. Isero states that, in the past, many of his students would not risk…