Historically, male students have been known to score lower than their female counterparts in reading and writing on standardized measures of academic success. While scholars, teachers, and even policymakers have attempted to explain and mitigate this gender gap in reading and writing scores, male students have had little opportunity to offer their…

Our current political moment has raised critical questions surrounding the efficacy of public education to deliver on its promise of social uplift. This ethnographic case study utilizes Louis Althusser's conception of ideology--which insists that the way to dismantle systemic injustice is first to recognize its imprint on our everyday actions--to…

Local volunteer opportunities hold the potential for university students to develop as leaders and engaged members of the academic community, but students taking prescribed (sometimes termed developmental education) courses may be overlooked as candidates for these kinds of opportunities. Taking an anti-deficit stance, university faculty may…

Educational psychologists can play a number of roles within education settings. They are often called upon to assist with the assessment and treatment of disability issues, student behaviour and mental health problems, parent and teacher liaison, and counselling, to name a few. Less frequently pursued is an active role in establishing and…

The problem addressed in this study was the level of preparedness of first-year community college students enrolled in remedial math and English courses instead of entering college-level courses. Hence, many high school graduates are not satisfactorily prepared to endure the rigors of college coursework and have to take remedial courses. The…

Learning communities can be useful to counter some of the challenges encountered by first-semester students as they transition to college. This 2-year process evaluation examines the launch of a campus-wide learning community initiative for developmental reading students at a community college in the USA. Students, instructors, and administrators…

Throughout the 20th century, a limited number of scholarly oriented books and monographs were issued that should have had great influence on later theory, research, and praxis associated with the college reading and study strategies field. Yet, these works have been, at least to some extent, lost to the winds of time. The lessons that can be…

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional, ex-post facto data study was to examine factors related to community college students who enrolled in developmental English and/or enrolled in combined developmental English and reading courses persistence and engagement at urban community colleges. The dependent variables…

There is a range of reasons why college students may be underprepared to read, but one possibility is that some college students are below a threshold of proficiency in the component skills of reading. The presence of thresholds means that when students fall below that threshold, their proficiency in that component skill of reading is not…

There is a range of reasons why college students may be underprepared to read, but one possibility is that some college students are below a threshold of proficiency in the component skills of reading. The presence of thresholds means that when students fall below that threshold, their proficiency in that component skill of reading is not…

I detail findings from an ethnographic study of a high school remedial reading class, with a particular focus on students' perceptions of what it means to be literate and how their mandatory enrollment in the course impacted their identities. Compounding students' experiences was the existence of a high-stakes reading examination that all students…

This manuscript presents a study that was undertaken at three community college sites. The study was designed to build upon a prior study (Armstrong, Stahl, & Kantner, 2015a, 2015b, 2016) that aimed to answer the following general query: "What constitutes college-level text-readiness?" In the present study, that question was directly…

A significant number of students enter community colleges with developmental education (DE) needs in reading, writing, and mathematics. Many of these students are typically referred to more than one level of DE courses before they can enroll in a college-level course. This has led to lower than desired success rate of DE students over the years.…

This phenomenological qualitative study aimed to examine the lived experiences of virtual teachers responsible for developmental reading skills in a suburban school district in southeastern Virginia. This school division had over 25 schools responsible for the instruction of primary students in grades Kindergarten through second grade. Grades from…

Fluent reading, which involves visual serial processing of letters/characters (i.e., visual temporal processing, VTP), greatly contributes to our daily life. The present study thus explored the underlying mechanism of reading fluency from the perspective of VTP. A longitudinal method was adopted to examine whether VTP skills in preschool (mean age…