The dissertation consists of three studies that are the process of designing, developing, and evaluating generative-AI-powered story-authoring platforms for children. The first study focuses on the formative study on how stakeholders in education (i.e., teachers, parents, and students) perceive and leverage generative AI platforms (i.e., ChatGPT…

The Fountas and Pinnell "Leveled Literacy Intervention System" (LLI), first edition, is a textbook series designed for struggling elementary school readers. The materials have become entrenched in the nation's schools and are currently utilized as an intervention resource in all fifty states and four of the seven largest school districts…

Students with significant support needs (SSN) have often been denied the breadth and depth of literacy instruction compared to their nondisabled peers. However, exposure to academic literacy increases when students with SSN are educated with their peers without disabilities within inclusive settings. While exposure is the first step to accessing…

Reading difficulties during childhood often continue during adulthood and result in adverse effects (e.g., unemployment, poverty). A common method to teach early literacy skills is via multisensory instructional programs, which use combinations of mnemonic devices, such as visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic movements. The current…

A hopeful path to furthering social justice in America is to support all young children to develop the habits of mind necessary for guiding, and fully living, their own lives. Unfortunately, much of what is known from brain research, psychology, and the learning sciences regarding the contextual and relational ways young children learn is not…

Over the last several decades, forms of reading have expanded far beyond conventional print-based text to include multimodal representational forms rooted in new practices and contexts (Miller, 2007) including a variety of text formats within technologies. This rapidly changing digital landscape has impacts on the ways in which students engage…

Families and educators have voiced concerns about the literacy skills of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the situation. Pandemic era studies have demonstrated the ramifications that students with ASD have faced, including regression of literacy skills, lower grades, lack of support services,…

An achievement gap exists in the United States between children of color and their White peers. This gap is most prevalent in the content discipline of literacy, as literacy achievement affects student success in other content areas. To address this problem, educational researchers have identified a conceptual framework and culturally relevant…

The study investigates how school leaders can build the capacity of teachers to effectively teach literacy. The current reliance and obsession with student performance on standardized test scores has resulted in a fast paced search for packaged reading programs that will lead to increased reading achievement for all students. The reliance on…

Black boys often underperform in English Language assessments. Strive for Excellence Academy (SFEA, a pseudonym) was a Title I school serving more than 500 students in Grade 2 and Grade 3 in an urban/suburban city in New York State. The achievement gap for third-grade Black boys was found to originate in their second-grade classrooms. Anecdotal…

This exploratory case study aims to better understand the interactions between and literacy activities, practices, and actions of fifth-grade students, their teachers, and learning environments during a student-directed extended inquiry unit (the Kids Inquiry Conference--KIC) where students propose their own topics to be researched. This study…

A 2014 study found that more than half of all Americans aged 16-74 do not possess the literacy skills needed to adequately cope with the demands of day-to-day life, with over 13 million people in the United States alone considered to be functionally illiterate. There have been numerous efforts to address these high illiteracy rates by way of Adult…

Through a sociocultural lens, this study examines five Saudi Arabian engineering graduate students' valuation of English writing, their self-perceptions of writing, what promoted the development of those self-perceptions and how their self-perceptions compare with engineering industry writing standards. The data collected for this qualitative case…