Because authenticity in education is a subjective judgment regarding the meaningfulness of an activity, a need exists to co-investigate with students classroom factors increasing authenticity of writing. In this case study, one 8th grade student's needs for authentic writing are explored in detail. Xavier's take on authentic writing…

Thousands and thousands of middle school students around the world participate in reading intervention programs, many that are very expensive with limited effectiveness. We wanted to know if an after-school intervention focused on close reading procedures could improve student achievement. Close reading of complex text involves annotations,…

Digital tools have the potential to transform instruction and promote literacies outlined in the Common Core State Standards. Empirical research is examined to illustrate this potential in grades 6-12 instruction.

The purpose of this study was to explore middle school (grade 6-8) students' understanding and interpretation of human rights issues with local and global implications as they engaged in the process of creating a film after reading print and multimedia texts and participating in human rights education activities. As the students explored…

This article looks at how social and participatory media can be used to strengthen interdisciplinary literacy and connects the multimodality of social environments with Middle-Years Mathematics curriculum and delivery. The article reports on part of an eighteen months action research study in an Australian public high school within the…

Adolescents often use root word and affix knowledge to figure out unknown words. Anglin (1993) found that younger readers favor the Part-to-Whole strategy, and Tyler and Nagy (1989) confirmed the importance of root-word knowledge for middle school students. This study seeks to understand the different strategies middle school readers use so that…

This article describes an after-school program in which immigrant and urban low-income middle school students collaborated to create social maps of their school and to produce a multilingual video against gossip. These literacy-based projects combined critical pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy to promote meaningful interactions between…

This case study describes a year-long, tutorial intervention with a disfluent eighth-grade reader. Focused instruction, including guided reading at the appropriate instructional level (4th grade), repeated readings, and home tape-recorder readings, led the student to improve his reading rate by 33% (75 wpm to 100 wpm). Formative and summative…

In 2006, a secondary English and feminist studies teacher created a course and designed a study around a reading exchange for eighth-grade girls from two vastly different communities. Girls from a school in a northeastern state read young adult novels and wrote about their reading and related topics with girls from Washington, DC on a wikispace…

This article reports on findings from a school-based action research project with aboriginal adolescent students attending an alternative school in Canada. As a Freirean response to these marginalized students' school failures, the researcher engaged students in a critical multiliteracies approach to language and literacy learning. Based on…

Concerned about these statistics that only 31% of the eighth-grade students on the NAEP 2007 reading assessment performed on the proficient level or above, a university research team of educators conducted a multiple-case study, creating a collection of snapshots of adolescent students' literacy needs, and compared their needs to the instruction…

This article presents partial results of an ethnographic study about literacy practices among adolescents living near the United States-Mexico border. The students became involved in literacy practices with their friends and family at home. These practices were related to the adolescents' interests in popular culture such as reading magazines or…

Today's adolescent student is thriving in a world where information and communication technology (ICT) encourages literate practices. These practices, described and theorized by studies of the new literacies, are not encouraged or supported in most school settings where traditional notions of literacy still dominate. Students in grades 6-8 at a…

Students in an eighth-grade, urban, low-achieving reading class were introduced to critical literacy through engagement in Image Theatre. Developed by liberatory dramatist Augusto Boal, Image Theatre gives participants the opportunity to examine texts in the triple role of interpreter, artist, and sculptor (i.e., image creator). The researchers…

Can daily access to laptop computers help students become better writers? Are such programs affordable? Evidence from the Inspired Writing program in Littleton Public Schools, Colorado, USA, provides a resounding yes to both questions. The program employs student netbooks, open-source software, cloud computing, and social media to help students in…