Student success is closely related to student engagement and literacy instruction, which can positively or negatively impact a student. It has been documented that children motivated to read have a strong sense of reading efficacy and academic competence (Wigfield et al., 2015). This research study addressed the skills needed by literacy…

Wisdom and leadership should go hand in hand. Both are concerned with human flourishing. Leadership is about making the right things happen the right way for the good of the collective. Discerning and doing the right things ultimately requires wisdom. While wisdom is esteemed as the highest intellectual and moral virtue, few studies explore the…

Developmental research confirms the importance of early parental language input for building children's vocabulary and language skills (Hart & Risley, 1995). While reading with a caregiver is a common way for language input to occur, the approaches parents utilize often fail to capitalize on techniques for improving language and pre-literacy…

This study examined English Language Arts teachers' reading engagement and reading motivation and how these correlated with student achievement scores on the 2023 Georgia Milestones. The researcher used the Adult Motivation to Read Scale (Schutte & Malouff, 2007) to obtain teacher-provided data on questions pertaining to teachers' reading…

This dissertation is about implicit prosody, the prosodic structure that readers assign during silent reading. The dissertation has several goals: determining which reading tasks are appropriate for studying implicit prosody, establishing how grammatical principles could guide incremental assignment of prosodic structure, and investigating how…

The current study's purpose was to validate a revised Story World Absorption Scale (SWAS; Kuijpers et al., 2014) as a measure of habitual adolescent reading engagement. This approach to measuring reading engagement reflects the multidimensionality and theoretical alignment that is currently missing from the reading engagement literature.…

This dissertation investigates the efficacy of LitFit, an innovative reading workshop program, in enhancing the reading skills and habits of male high school students in a rural setting. The study addresses the critical issue of lower reading proficiency among male students, a demographic that has historically received limited attention in English…

This study used the portraiture method to explore the reading lives of four college students by examining their reading lives in three eras: the present, the past, and the future. Using long-form, active interviews, this study asked participants to reflect on their daily reading habits, their experiences learning to read, and their aspirations for…

The aim of this qualitative study was to examine home literacy environment (HLE) and how this environment affects the way parental responded to their children's oral miscues during shared reading. In addition, parental behavior-specifically corrective feedback as it relates to children's perceptions of reading in terms of their reading attitudes…

This qualitative case study explores the practices and perceptions of key stakeholders (administrators, educators, parents, and students) in the development of the elementary reader within the context of 100 Book Challenge. Studying the most influential stakeholders will provide a holistic understanding of the events and beliefs around developing…

Teaching topics on Indigenous people and culture can be challenging for educators in K-12 classrooms for a multitude of reasons. This dissertation examines the epistemological complexities that teaching Indigenous identity, cultural teachings, and futurities are met with in mainstream classrooms. In the early chapters, I spend time describing what…

African American males often struggle with reading motivation and reading achievement. The problem addressed in this research study was that low reading motivation in African American males is associated with low scoring on standardized and summative reading assessments. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the reading…

This study explored the multifaceted dynamics affecting the academic performance of high-achieving elementary students on end-of-year reading exams. It examines the influences of gender, age, genre preferences, the frequency of book borrowing, and language modality of instruction, all within the context of the elementary school library.…

The family is the axis of the initial formation of the individual in the early stage of his life. The attachment and affective ties that are established through the interactions between its members and the experiences that are shared, promote meaningful learning. Through this research, the perception families have about exposing their children to…

The ability to read and understand texts are important to student's success in school and life. However, many secondary students enter without the skills needed to handle the rigor and amount of reading they will meet as they matriculate high school. Yet, this is not the case for those who struggle to read most. Allington (2013) found that…