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Qualitative data analysis from open‐ended comments written by 206 undergraduates illustrates student attitudes, beliefs, and practices that reveal an academic reading paradox. Consistently, undergraduates report that reading is valuable, yet their noncompliance with reading assignments suggests otherwise. Undergraduates report that they achieve their academic goals with little reading and that they perceive reading as too voluminous and irrelevant to class outcomes. The data highlight a misalignment between conventional academic expectations that undergraduates will read in scholarly ways and their actual academic reading practice. Qualitative analysis illustrates that students do not experience academic reading as a venue for scholarly engagement in disciplinary discourse. Whereas the academic reading literature proposes that students develop along a continuum from novice to expert reader, findings suggest that the undergraduate experience of academic reading is not representative of that continuum.

This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

Teaching for theme is one aspect of reading comprehension that is often elusive for both teachers and students. Specifically, teachers are challenged with elevating students’ thinking from the plot level to a more abstract level when teaching for theme understanding. Students are challenged with transitioning between the story world and the real world to construct viable theme statements. The authors share some initial classroom lessons that can be taught as a starting point to guide students in their interpretation and construction of themes.

Literature circles undoubtedly foster literacy, but successful participation in literature circles requires students’ social and emotional competence. The author presents findings from a study of a fifth-grade student who demonstrated socioemotional growth while participating in literature circles. Specifically, growth in intrapersonal and interpersonal skills such as self-management, social awareness, social metacognition, and empathy were evident. These findings suggest that literature circles foster not only literacy but also socioemotional learning.

Writer's checklists are evidence-based procedural facilitators that prompt students to actively engage in the writing process. Students with diverse learning needs experience problems when composing texts because of the complex steps involved. To write effectively, students must focus on understanding prompts; setting goals; generating, organizing, and translating ideas; revising content; and editing for conventions. This lengthy process often negatively affects struggling writers’ working memory and ability to self-regulate the writing process. A writer's checklist, an explicit step-by-step action plan, can be used to scaffold struggling writers’ progress and minimize challenges. Writers’ checklists serve not only as concrete reminders of the steps needed to accomplish writing tasks but also as self-checks to keep students focused and promote self-regulation. In this teaching tip, the authors recommend using a writer's checklist at the initial stages of the writing process, namely planning and drafting, before implementing it at the revising and editing stages.

This department focuses on literacy leaders, including school and instructional leaders, teachers, and external partners, who are working to improve outcomes for adolescent and adult learners in a wide range of education settings. Columns investigate the challenges and complexities inherent in such work and share lessons learned, impactful strategies and approaches, and promising pathways forward.

The authors examined how high school seniors conceptualized the task of writing college admissions essays, the audience for that writing, and themselves as potentially college‐worthy writers. In a survey and related interviews, students revealed more emphasis on generic good writing than on the narrative argument genre that college admissions personnel often privilege. Students who wrote to address a specific college admissions audience varied considerably in how they conceptualized this set of readers, and many students did not write with a particular audience in mind. Students who emphasized the pivotal role of writing quality were often equivocal about their chances of being convincing. These findings suggest that teachers should help students learn about the narrative argument genre, build students' familiarity with admissions readers as audiences, and support students' sense of self‐efficacy in academic writing. Recommendations for reshaping college admissions are also included.

Interactive writing is a process‐oriented instructional approach designed to make the composing and encoding processes of writing overt and explicit for young students who are learning to write. It is particularly suitable for students who struggle with literacy learning. This article describes one first‐grade teacher's use of interactive writing to teach her students what it means to write and how they could go about it. The project documents the writing processes, conventions, and strategies that the teacher taught during interactive writing lessons across one academic year and illustrates how the students learned and subsequently used those conceptual tools to mediate their independent writing. Results of the project demonstrate the expediency of interactive writing instruction for supporting the learning‐to‐write process and hold important implications for writing instruction in the early childhood program.

Practitioners face many challenges when working with students who are experiencing difficulty with comprehension. The act of creating meaning with texts is complex, and comprehension is often measured in schools as a product of reading. Product assessments, such as answering questions or retelling a text, take place after reading, which makes it difficult to understand why and when a student may be experiencing difficulties. Using design-based research, the author examined the implementation of verbal protocols in classrooms as a formative assessment tool for comprehension. During this two-month study, three reading specialists drew on the landscape model of reading as a theoretical framework to better understand their students’ think-aloud statements. Findings indicated that reading specialists implemented verbal protocols as a formative assessment tool with diagnostic interpretation about their students’ reading difficulties and were able to use this information to effectively coach students on their reading processes.

The authors report on a think-aloud study of college students placed into developmental reading courses as they learned and implemented a new strategy device. The purpose was to investigate the device's potential utility for students, especially given the current practical trends in the field to move away from strategy instruction. Findings suggest that while reading textbook chapters in biology and history, the participants drew on existing text knowledge, awareness of disciplinary text differences, and awareness of metacognitive processes. The participants demonstrated that they were aware of their reliance on prior knowledge (of text structure and organization, of disciplinary differences, and of content knowledge) and also of gaps in their prior knowledge. This speaks to the need for empirical research on strategy devices, such as PILLAR, for new-to-college learners.