More knowledge is needed regarding the student factors that impact academic reading and success in college beyond traditional measures of college readiness. This study examined the contributions of student factors specified by the Proficient Academic Reader framework--reading literacy skills, metacognitive reading strategies, and reading…

The goal of the present investigation is to determine how undergraduate students think about critical reading. We asked 249 students to rate the usefulness of several critical reading skills, how often those skills are taught, and whether they practice those skills when working on their assignments. We found that students consider more complex…

Critical reading requires a deep and active engagement with the text. The goal of this study was to empirically determine what critical reading skills faculty believe students should develop. We asked faculty to rate how useful they consider several critical reading behaviors and how often they model those behaviors in their classes. Faculty…

This article reports on a collaborative research project involving faculty in writing studies, communication disorders, and applied linguistics that sought to empirically describe the reading skills of students (N = 910) in freshman composition classes at one college and two universities in the northeast United States. The research team developed…

Motivation in reading performance is important, as reading motivation facilitates effective learning. The decline in reading motivation that has typically been observed in Iranian universities is thus a serious concern for Iranian EFL learners. The aim of this study was to promote the reading literacy of Iranian English as foreign language (EFL)…

The current study, which is descriptive and correlational in design, intends to find out if, (a) Iranian university learners of English, Russian, and Arabic as foreign languages have the same patterns of reading strategy awareness and use (RSAU), and (b) their self-perceived reading ability correlates with their RSAU level. English, Russian, and…

Previous surveys of university academic reading generally employed questionnaires and fell short of an in-depth analysis of students' skill needs and difficulties. Taking a qualitative approach, the current study interviewed 22 undergraduates and 7 language teachers from a New Zealand university. Together the participants highlighted a number of…

The following study is part of a larger study exploring reading identity in students who were placed into a mandatory developmental reading class because of low scores on college placement exams. Sociocultural theories of learning framed the qualitative study. Although the larger study addressed two overarching questions related to reading…

This article describes the results of a research synthesis that analyzed more than 60 articles published in the "Journal of College Reading and Learning" ("JCRL") between 2005 and 2013. The goal for the research was to gain understanding about the extent to which the social turn in literacy studies is impacting postsecondary…

This article reports on student surveys and faculty interviews with regard to a university pilot project of a common book program for first-year students. We found that a minority of students read the book and the book was integrated into only some faculty members' courses. First-year students varied in their perceptions of the impact the project…

In this study, we investigated the self-efficacy beliefs and sources of self-efficacy among first-year college students placed in developmental reading courses. Students enrolled in developmental reading were compared to students who were not placed in developmental reading courses in terms of self-efficacy in various contexts and sources of…

Two experiments were conducted with developmental education students to investigate the impact of a contextualized intervention focusing on written summarization and other reading and writing skills. In experiment 1 (n = 322), greater gain was found for intervention than comparison participants on three summarization measures: proportion of main…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of a critical thinking rubric as an assessment of reading achievement for students enrolled in a reading intervention course. A reading prompt and scoring rubric, based on Richard Paul and Linda Elder's critical thinking framework, were created to assess critical reading in an intervention…

This qualitative study focused on at-risk college freshmen's ability to read and write expository text using game-like, online expository writing activities. These activities required participants to write descriptions of a target object so that peers could guess what the object was, after which they were given the results of those guesses as…

Assesses the feasibility of using a statewide database containing standardized test scores to examine the utility of developmental reading programs in Texas. Suggests that a wide range of academic experiences may pull most students up in terms of reading competence. (TB)