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Research Literacy

A primer for understanding and using research, jeffrey s. beaudry and lynne miller.

• Chapter appendices featuring sample responses to the exercises. -->
• sample chapter
• about the authors Jeffrey S. Beaudry , PhD, is Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Southern Maine. His interests include visual learning, assessment literacy, formative assessment, action research, science literacy, educational technology, and program evaluation. The author or coauthor of more than 20 journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Beaudry teaches research methods courses online and in blended media formats. Lynne Miller , EdD, is Professor Emerita of Educational Leadership at the University of Southern Maine, where she held the Walter E. Russell Chair in Education and Philosophy and directed the Southern Maine Partnership. An experienced teacher and leader in K-12 public schools and higher education, she is committed to linking theory and practice and to promoting research literacy for practitioners. Dr. Miller has authored or coauthored seven books and more than 50 articles. She continues to be engaged as a scholar and activist for equality in education. -->

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Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice

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• Description
• Aims and Scope
• Editorial Board
• Abstracting / Indexing
• Submission Guidelines

Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice is a double-anonymized, peer-reviewed annual journal that reports contemporary research and theory in literacy and literacy education. The articles in LR:TMP are to promote discussion and constructive critique about key areas of research. Articles are to reflect the content of the Literacy Research Association (LRA) Annual Meeting and inform scholarship in the field. Presenters at the Annual Meeting of the LRA Conference are invited to submit articles based on their presentations for possible inclusion in LR:TMP . Selected manuscripts are typically published online by November in the annual volume.

• ERIC (Education Resources Information Center)
• MLA International Bibliography
• OCLC: Article First
• Psychological Abstracts

Style Sheet & Guidelines for Manuscript Preparation

Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice (LR:TMP) reports on contemporary research and theory in literacy and literacy education reflecting the content of the Literacy Research Association Annual Conference. Manuscripts grounded in a wide array of theoretical, methodological, and knowledge traditions as well as those speaking across paradigms are welcomed. LR:TMP includes refereed articles by both emerging scholars and more established researchers. We invite all presenters at the Annual LRA Conference to submit articles based on their presentations for possible inclusion in LR:TMP .

LR:TMP is a double-anonymized peer-reviewed publication. Only manuscripts that were presented at the 2023 Literacy Research Association Annual Conference and not under consideration for publication through another outlet will be considered for LR:TMP Volume 73 . Acceptance of papers by the 2023 LRA Annual Conference program committee does not guarantee publication in LR:TMP .

All submissions will be made electronically through ScholarOne. ScholarOne will automatically generate an email receipt when your manuscript is successfully submitted. After preliminary editorial review, at least three reviewers with expertise in the subject area will be invited to evaluate each manuscript. All manuscripts will receive a double-anonymized review. Authors are cautioned to report their research in ways that will not provide unnecessary clues to their identities. References to the author’s work can be inserted upon acceptance.

Manuscripts will be evaluated and selected for inclusion in LR:TMP based on the following criteria:

• Scholarship: Situated in relevant and contemporary scholarship
• Framing: Cogency of theoretical and/or conceptual framing
• Methodology: Modes and/or techniques of inquiry and analysis well-suited to questions/focus
• Findings/Conclusions: Well-supported findings and/or conclusions
• Coherence: Clear organization and coherence across all sections of the manuscript
• Significance: Contribution to knowledge, theory, method, and/or practice in the field of literacy

MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION CHECKLIST

• Manuscripts: Aimed toward 7500-8500 words, not to exceed 9000 words including abstract (250 words), references, figures (1/2 page=205 words), and tables;
• Figures and tables submitted as separate documents
• Permissions for photos, videos, links, and texts
• Include 4-5 keywords
• Include order of authors and institutional affiliation and ORCID for each author
• APA guidelines (7th edition)
• A Microsoft Word document should be uploaded to: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/lrtmp

MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION

1. Follow APA style (7th edition) when preparing the text, reference list, tables, and figures. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th edition) is available from the American Psychological Association (1200 17th Street N. W., Washington, D.C. 20036). Please pay particular attention to APA guidelines for headings, references, and construction of tables and figures.

2. Content and clarity of communication are critical considerations for acceptance.

3. LR: TMP rarely publishes endnotes or footnotes. Please incorporate this information into the text.

4. Name the file with the title of the article, not the author’s/authors’ names to ensure masked review. Please consult the APA guide (7th edition) for information about masking manuscripts both in the body of the manuscript and reference list. Submit the masked Microsoft Word manuscript electronically on the ScholarOne website.

• Include 4-5 keywords. These keywords will appear beneath the abstract in the publication.
• Authors should aim for 7500-8500 words, not to exceed 9000 words, including an abstract (up to 250 words), tables, figures, images, etc.
• Specify the order of authors and include the institutional affiliation and ORCID for each author.

5. To meet length specifications, consider the following:

• Eliminate nonessential words and phrases. Removing unnecessary prepositions, articles, and superfluous phrases often reduces an article by one to three pages.
• Use tables and figures only when absolutely necessary, as these items can add considerably to the length of the manuscript. Tables, figures, and images should be included only when they increase clarity. Information in tables/figures/images should not be repeated in the narrative. Authors must select tables/figures/images to be half or full page, although the final decision will be made by Sage based upon the quality of the tables/figures/images. Each table/figure/image included in the manuscript will be included in the word count (1-page image = 410 words; ½ page image = 205 words).

6. Figures should be uploaded as separate files according to the following guidelines:

• Format –TIFF, JPEG, PDF: Common format for pictures (containing no text or graphs). EPS: Preferred format for graphs and line art (retains quality when enlarging/zooming in). Microsoft Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) are also accepted.
• Resolution – Rasterized based files (i.e. with .tiff or .jpeg extensions) require a resolution of at least 300 dpi . Line art should be supplied with a minimum resolution of 800 dpi .
• Color –Please note that images supplied in color will be published in color online and black and white in print (unless otherwise arranged). Therefore, it is important that you supply images that are comprehensible in black and white as well (i.e. by using color with a distinctive pattern or dotted lines). The captions should not include words indicating color. 

7. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for photos, videos, links, and texts included within their manuscripts.

8. Confirmation of manuscript receipt will be sent to the contact author when the submission is successfully submitted via ScholarOne. If confirmation notice is not received, please contact [email protected] with “Confirmation Request” in the subject line.

9. Timeline for peer review and editorial decisions:

• February 9, 2024: Author Submission Deadline
• March 15, 2024: Peer Reviews Due
• April 5-12, 2024: Decision Letters Sent to Corresponding Authors

Conflict of interest It is the policy of Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice to require a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors enabling a statement to be carried within all published articles.

It is the policy of Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice to require a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors enabling a statement to be carried within all published articles. Please ensure that you have declared any conflict of interest during the submission process in ScholarOne. Visit this page for more information about identifying conflicts of interest.

Funding acknowledgement Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice requires all authors to acknowledge any funding sources during the submission process in ScholarOne. For funded projects, you will be asked to list the name of the funding agency and the grant or award number in ScholarOne. Please visit this page for more information about funding acknowledgments.   Informed Consent All research studies with human participants must have been performed in accordance with the principles stated in the Declaration of Helsinki.

Ethical approval must have been obtained for all protocols from the local institutional review board (IRB) or other appropriate ethics committee. You will be asked to confirm this to be the case during the submission process in ScholarOne. For research articles, authors are also required to attest that participants provided informed consent (and assent, if applicable).

Authors must be prepared to provide further information to the journal editorial office upon request

*Manuscripts that do not meet these guidelines or submission deadlines may not be reviewed or may be rejected at the editorial level.

For more information, please refer to the Sage Manuscript Submission G uidelines .

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To order single issues of this journal, please contact SAGE Customer Services at 1-800-818-7243 / 1-805-583-9774 with details of the volume and issue you would like to purchase.

Welcome to the

Literacy research commons.

Literacy Research Commons is a  site dedicated to sharing a range of material within the Literacy field. 

Fact-checking the Science of Reading

Rob Tierney and P David Pearson explore the validity of claims associated with the Science of Reading as they have appeared in social media, the popular press, and academic works.

The book offers a comprehensive review of these claims—analyzing the evidence, reasoning, assumptions, and consequences associated with each claim—and closes with ideas for moving beyond the debates to greater consensus or accommodation of differences. The book is a must read for educators involved in teaching reading, as well as parents, policy makers, and other stakeholders.

A History of Literacy Education

In this volume, Rob and David trace the monumental shifts in theory, research, and practice related to reading education and literacy, with particular attention to what they consider the central goal of literacy—making meaning. Each section describes a specific epoch, including a brief snapshot of how the reader of that period is envisioned and characterized by researchers and teachers, as well as a deep discussion of the ideas and contextual events of that era. These developmental waves are organized in rough historical sequence by a series of shifts in underlying theoretical and scholarly lenses—from the behavioral to the psycholinguistic to the cognitive to the sociocultural to the critical to the multimodal to the global.

Modern History of Literacy Research

Some social and scientific foundations

The search for best method

Cognitive turn

Learning to learn

Reading-writing relationships

The social wave

The critical wave

New assessment paradigms

The era of reform

Digital literacies

Global wave

Cross currents: research frames and methodology

Robert Tierney [email protected]

Unsettling Literacies

Directions for literacy research in precarious times

• © 2022
• Claire Lee 0 ,
• Chris Bailey   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1969-5001 1 ,
• Cathy Burnett   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6087-244X 2 ,
• Jennifer Rowsell   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9062-8859 3

Children and Young People Network, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

School of education, university of bristol, bristol, uk.

• Offers international perspectives on the notion of 'unsettling literacies' and literacies in precarious times
• Includes case studies to illustrate a variety of contexts purusing new lines of inquiry
• Presents research post-covid-19 that offers new insights and conceptual framing for researchers

Part of the book series: Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education (CSTE, volume 15)

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

Front matter, trajectories of being and becoming: relationships across time that keep us humble.

• Catherine Compton-Lilly

Can a Research Space Be a Third Space? Methodology and Hierarchies in Participatory Literacy Research

• Sara Hawley, John Potter

Sharing the Screen: Reconfiguring Participatory Methodologies for Digitally Mediated Literacy Research

• Bethany Monea

A Felt Presence: Affect, Emotion, and Memory as Literacy Researchers

• Bronwyn T. Williams

Attending to Our Response-abilities: Diff/Reading Data Through Pedagogies of the Other-wise

• Amélie Lemieux, Kelly C. Johnston, Fiona Scott

‘Connected to the Soul’: Autoethnography, Neurodiversity and Literacies in Times of Ongoing Change

• Chris Bailey

Pop-Up Productions: Gifts Presented in Loss

• Jana Boschee Ellefson, Kim Lenters

Engaging Parents in Inquiry Curriculum Projects with Social Media: Using Metalogue to Probe the Methodological and Ethical Dilemmas in Literacy Research

• Linda-Dianne Willis, Beryl Exley

Literacies Yet to Come: Young Children’s Emergent, Provisional and Speculative Literacies for Precarious Futures

• Abigail Hackett

Perplexities and Possibilities in Literacy Curriculum and Pedagogical Change: A Research Partnership and Experiment in Materialist Methodologies

• Michelle A. Honeyford, Shelley Warkentin, Karla Ferreira da Costa

Engaging DIY Media-Making to Explore Uncertain and Dystopic Conditions with 2SLGBTQ+ Youth and Allies in New Brunswick, Canada

• Casey Burkholder, Funké Aladejebi, Jennifer Thompson

Uncertain Springs of Activism: Walking with Hoggart

• Julian McDougall, Pete Bennett, John Potter

Back Matter

• literacy research for change during uncertainty
• literacy research for change during disruptions
• literacies and activism
• researching activist literacy practices
• hopeful literacies in uncertain times
• complexity uncertainty and literacies
• methodological challenges for literacy researchers
• literacy research and uncertainty
• participatory methodologies for literacy research
• perplexities and literacies
• literacies for an uncertain future
• transnational literacies in precarious times
• directions in literacy research
• literacy research for post-covid-19 era
• challenges and opportunities for future literacy research
• issues in literacy research in 21st century
• literacies and the global south
• social justice and literacy
• theoretical perspectives for literacy research
• literacies as social action

About this book

This book asks researchers what uncertainty means for literacy research, and for how literacy plays through uncertain lives. While the book is not focused only on COVID-19, it is significant that it was written in 2020-2021, when our authors’ and readers’ working and personal lives were thrown into disarray by stay-at-home orders. The book opens up new spaces for examining ways that literacy has come to matter in the world.

Drawing on the reflections of international literacy researchers and important new voices, this book presents re-imagined methods and theoretical imperatives. These difficult times have surfaced new communicative practices and opened out spaces for exploration and activism, prompting re-examination of relationships between research, literacy and social justice.

The book considers varied and consequential events to explore new ways to think and research literacy and to unsettle what we know and accept as fundamental to literacy research, opening ourselves up for change. It provides direction to the field of literacy studies as pressing global concerns are prompting literacy researchers to re-examine what and how they research in times of precarity.

Editors and Affiliations

Chris Bailey, Cathy Burnett

Jennifer Rowsell

About the editors

Claire Lee is an Early Career Research Fellow in the Children and Young People Network at Oxford Brookes University. Before completing her PhD in 2020, she was a primary school teacher and literacy subject leader. She is interested in children's learning lives and literacies, and how children develop a sense of self, as well as curriculum, power and classroom relationships. She conducts research that creates spaces for dialogue with children, using multimodal, participatory methods.

Chris Bailey is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Sheffield Hallam University. His work explores play; literacies; affective lived experience of space and place; sensory and embodied meaning-making; multimodal, participatory methods in research and communication. Chris is autistic and is interested in trying to work out what this means for how he understands and represents the world. He won the UK Literacy Association Student Research award in 2018 for the work that formed the basis of thisbook. He also received the UKLA / Wiley ‘Literacy’ Article of the Year Award in 2017. 

Cathy Burnett is Professor of Literacy and Education at Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her research has focused predominantly on the relationship between new technologies and literacies within and beyond educational contexts from a sociomaterial perspective, with a recent interest in the relationship between research methods and practice. 

Jennifer Rowsell is Professor of Literacies and Social Innovation at University of Bristol’s School of Education in the United Kingdom.Her research interests include multimodal, makerspace and arts-based research with young people; digital literacies research with children; digital divide work in international contexts; and, applying posthumanist and affect theoretical and methodological approaches to literacy research. 

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Unsettling Literacies

Book Subtitle : Directions for literacy research in precarious times

Editors : Claire Lee, Chris Bailey, Cathy Burnett, Jennifer Rowsell

Series Title : Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6944-6

Publisher : Springer Singapore

eBook Packages : Education , Education (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022

Hardcover ISBN : 978-981-16-6943-9 Published: 05 March 2022

Softcover ISBN : 978-981-16-6946-0 Published: 06 March 2023

eBook ISBN : 978-981-16-6944-6 Published: 04 March 2022

Series ISSN : 2345-7708

Series E-ISSN : 2345-7716

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XXXVIII, 204

Number of Illustrations : 1 b/w illustrations

Topics : Literacy , Sociology of Education , Research Methods in Education

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Qualitative Literacy A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research

• by Mario Luis Small (Author) , Jessica McCrory Calarco (Author)
• August 2022
• First Edition
• Hardcover $95.00,  £80.00 Paperback $24.95,  £21.00 eBook $24.95,  £21.00

Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide Pages: 230 ISBN: 9780520390669 Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.25

About the Book

Suppose you were given two qualitative studies: one is a piece of empirically sound social science and the other, though interesting and beautifully written, is not. How would you tell the difference?  Qualitative Literacy presents criteria to assess qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviewing and participant observation. Qualitative research is indispensable to the study of inequality, poverty, education, public health, immigration, the family, and criminal justice. Each of the hundreds of ethnographic and interview studies published yearly on these issues is scientifically either sound or unsound. This guide provides social scientists, researchers, students, evaluators, policy makers, and journalists with the tools needed to identify and evaluate quality in field research.

From Our Blog

The Secret to Assessing Qualitative Research

By Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco, authors of Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research Suppose you are given two books, each based entirely on one year …

About the Author

Mario Luis Small is Quetelet Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He is an expert on inequality, poverty, networks, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. His most recent books include Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life , Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice , and Personal Networks: Classic Readings and New Directions in Egocentric Analysis. Jessica McCrory Calarco is Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. She is an expert on inequalities in family life and education, as well as on qualitative methods. She is the author of  Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School  and  A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum .

"This book is a must-read for any researcher, even those who specialize in quantitative methods. . . .It aims to be a textbook but achieves much more." — EPIC - Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community

" Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research is a wonderful book that should be required reading for all graduate students in Sociology; indeed, it is a useful guide for any social science discipline that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative training." — Social Forces

Table of Contents

CONTENTS Preface Introduction 1 Cognitive Empathy 2 Heterogeneity 3 Palpability 4 Follow-Up 5 Self-Awareness Conclusion Acknowledgments Appendix: A Note on Proposals Notes  References Index

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Research and Information Literacy

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• Page ID 70110

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Information literacy describes a set of abilities that enables an individual to acquire, evaluate, and use all information and Research literacy is the ability to access, interpret, and critically evaluate primary research literature. Both involve developing a range of critical thinking skills, including: 1) the discovery and evaluation of information, 2) understanding how information is produced and valued, and 3) the ethical use of information in creating new knowledge. Many of the concepts discussed in the pages in this section are also reflected in the Education and Professional Development  section in the Social Sciences library.

Information Literacy: Research and Collaboration across Disciplines

(9 reviews)

Barbara J. D'Angelo, Arizona State University

Sandra Jamieson, Drew University

Barry Maid, Arizona State University

Copyright Year: 2016

ISBN 13: 9781642150834

Publisher: WAC Clearinghouse

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Jennifer Bruce, Librarian, Rochester Community & Technical College on 11/25/20

This book provides support for the broad notion of shared ownership, responsibility, and accountability of higher education educators offering information literacy support at the institutional level during the 21st century. An inclusion of the... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

This book provides support for the broad notion of shared ownership, responsibility, and accountability of higher education educators offering information literacy support at the institutional level during the 21st century. An inclusion of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education Framework for Information Literacy provides a foundation for standardizing collaborated efforts among Higher Education institutions. Literary examples from multiple perspectives were provided, demonstrating higher education breakthroughs for shared pedagogical aspects of multiple disciplines. Efforts to collaborate, merge, and redefine information literacy encompassing both writing and research processes were also discussed and assessed in first year student compositions.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The development, standards, and practice for integrating information literacy in Higher Education is accurate.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

Teaching information literacy in higher education is very relevant and this resource is important for all educators.

Clarity rating: 5

The content of this resource is clearly defined for application among multiple pedagogical disciplines.

Consistency rating: 5

The book is consistent in terminology and framework.

Modularity rating: 5

Bold face type is utilized for identifying new concepts and subsequent sections are clearly identified.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The layout of the material is rigorous with extensive examples. Multiple topics and issues related to teaching information literacy are identified and discussed. Background understanding is provided at the beginning and reflections with references are included. An index is not included and this missing resource could improve reader content accessibility.

Interface rating: 4

The text, charts and images are clear.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

There are few to no grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

There could be more attention to cultural context in the frequent examples.

Reviewed by Jenise Overmier, Research and Instruction Librarian, Marymount University on 8/25/20

The text is part of a series, Perspectives on Writing, meant to “addresses writing studies in a broad sense. Consistent with the wide ranging approaches characteristic of teaching and scholarship in writing across the curriculum, the series... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

The text is part of a series, Perspectives on Writing, meant to “addresses writing studies in a broad sense. Consistent with the wide ranging approaches characteristic of teaching and scholarship in writing across the curriculum, the series presents works that take divergent perspectives on working as a writer, teaching writing, administering writing programs, and studying writing in its various forms.” It functions as an instructor-facing collection of articles related in theme, therefore comprehensiveness is not a critical component of the work. That said, the table of contents is the only index and there is no glossary. Definitions are embedded in the text of each chapter and there is naturally some divergence in the way concepts are approached. The organization of the articles into four major themes proved useful, as most instructors are unlikely to utilize the entire text.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

The content appears to be well-researched and free of errors. Most of the authors are writing instructors or academic librarians, thus their respective disciplinary perspectives are the most-represented. That said, the book is written for practitioners of such professions.

The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy is still relatively new and academic librarians will continue working with teaching faculty to integrate it into the curricula at their institutions. The content is extensible enough that it is unlikely to become obsolete in the near future.

Clarity rating: 4

The authors clearly define technical terms and the writing is accessible.

Consistency rating: 4

There is some deviance in definitions, as can be expected in a thematic collection of articles.

Modularity rating: 3

The book is fairly modular but would be most useful when viewed as a whole.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The book is well-organized.

Interface rating: 5

The interface is clean and simple to navigate. There are no images to display.

The text does not contain grammatical errors.

The text does not appear to be offensive. That said I am a cis/het white woman, so I may have been blind to elements that others would find offensive, though I endeavored to view it through a critical lens in the cultural regard.

Reviewed by Alexis Wolstein, Assistant Professor of Library Services; Information Literacy Coordinator, Colorado State University - Pueblo on 12/20/19

This is not a book for those unfamiliar with the concept of information literacy, nor is it intended to be. The book is a collection of research articles/chapters relating to information literacy instruction in higher education and would be best... read more

This is not a book for those unfamiliar with the concept of information literacy, nor is it intended to be. The book is a collection of research articles/chapters relating to information literacy instruction in higher education and would be best suited to higher ed professionals (especially those in Writing Studies) and librarians. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy is well explained and is the most significant conceptual follow-through in the book. Though not a traditional textbook in that it provides a comprehensive overview, this book nonetheless provides a thorough and varied perspective on a complex and dynamic topic. That being said, while it may be a useful text in graduate-level courses, it would be largely inaccessible to undergraduates, due to the extensive use of library and higher education specific jargon, the reliance on a scholarly tone throughout the chapters, and the absence of a glossary or index. While the book makes a good attempt at living up to its promise of "research and collaboration across disciplines" there is a significant focus on first year/introductory courses and the courses with a significant writing component. However, the concepts are thoroughly explored and could easily be applied to disciplines not specifically addressed in the book.

The text appears to be accurate with little perceived bias beyond the essential nature of Information Literacy instruction in higher education. Each article/chapter provides extensive references and, in many cases, additional resources.

The book is still relevant going into 2020, though the reliance on the current iteration of the ACRL Framework means that it is only a matter of time before there is newer research that will need to addressed. Furthermore, there has been much discussion within librarianship as to the efficacy and validity of the current Framework. There are also instances where chapters use screen captures, software examples, or language that have already become dated (Web 2.0, for example), distracting from the otherwise still relevant information. This is a difficult issue to address when looking at digital and media influenced information literacy, and some chapters are aging less dramatically than others. An updated edition with new chapters will likely be necessary sooner rather than later should the editors like to see the book remain relevant.

The clarity and quality varies by chapter, as is to be expected, but the book is overall accessible to its intended audience. As stated above, while it may be a useful text in graduate-level library and/or information science courses, it would be largely inaccessible to undergraduates, due to the extensive use of library and higher education specific jargon, the reliance on a scholarly tone throughout the chapters, and the absence of a glossary or index

Themes and terminology are consistent throughout and the ongoing use of the ACRL Framework lends a narrative to the book overall. The tone is consistently scholarly, despite the differing approaches to format and narrative from one chapter to the next. Each chapter topic lends itself to the theme of that section, as well as the overall intent of the book.

The text's modularity is perhaps its greatest strength. Each of the four parts is well defined and could be used individually; some chapters briefly refer to one another, but also could stand alone or be combined with chapters from other sections of the books. The additional resources of sample lessons and activities may be the most useful resources for instructors and can easily be adapted to be used in information literacy specific or general research instruction. Whereas resources and examples relating to developing programmatic and institutional information literacy decisions may be the most valuable resources to others.

The book is well organized and each chapter supports the larger theme of that part of the book. The book starts with situating the concept of information literacy, sets up the Framework, and moves to more specific examples and research projects. Each part has a chapter that could easily be moved to another section of the book, but this speaks as much to the overlap between concepts as it does the book's organization.

The interface is clear and displayed well in both mobile and desktop browsers. The PDF would benefit from a linked Table of Contents as seen in the ePUB but was easily searchable. Neither edition features a glossary or index but this was not a detriment to navigating the text.

No grammatical errors were found while reviewing the text.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The authors represent a variety of professional backgrounds and institutional demographics. There is a focus on higher education in the United States but the inclusion of some international perspectives is welcome. There was no cultural insensitivity observed.

There is no consistent indication of each chapter's author's disciplinary background. If not mentioned by the author in the chapter, it is absent and leaves the reader to make assumptions. That being said, I look forward to utilizing this text and sharing chapters with colleagues. There is valuable information here, backed up by good research and extensive references, that is applicable across disciplines and in interdisciplinary approaches. The varied approaches are appreciated and make the text relevant to higher education professionals beyond academic librarians and writing instructors.

Reviewed by Megan Thomas, Electronic Resources and Assessment Librarian, Montana State University - Billings on 7/31/19

This book is a thorough discussion of information literacy intended for university instructors and librarians. It clearly explains the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy and places it in the current discussion of discipline specific and... read more

This book is a thorough discussion of information literacy intended for university instructors and librarians. It clearly explains the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy and places it in the current discussion of discipline specific and institution-wide information literacy competencies. Beyond that, the text does address, in detail, some of the challenges regarding the Framework. It is a collection of research articles authored by professionals from a variety of institutions and disciplines, therefore offering approaches to information literacy from different perspectives. Each of the chapters in the collection can stand alone as an in-depth research article. The text also offers case studies of implementing information literacy programmatically. In addition, quite a few of the chapters clearly demonstrate the similarities between the Framework and other disciplines’ core skills, for instance, the Writing Program Administrators Outcomes Statement. Readers will find a thorough discussion of pedagogy, assessments, metaliteracy, and research. While it does offer a variety of discipline-specific research, for example research in education, general business, and economics, the text is not exhaustive. The science disciplines are a specific area that are not covered in terms of information literacy.

The content seems accurate and error-free. The individual articles are comprehensively researched and include extensive reference lists.

The text remains up-to-date and relevant as far as the research of each chapter remains relevant. That being said, the text should remain relevant for years to come. Any modifications to the Framework would necessitate updating the text, due to the fact that it relies heavily on the Framework. Currently, the collection is an excellent picture of the information literacy landscape at the college level.

Each chapter of the book is written by a different author so the prose changes, and the overall tone is scholarly. The intended audience is obviously university faculty, librarians, and instructors, so the terminology is appropriate for professionals. The prose, jargon, and terminology are not appropriate for student reading. Undergraduate students would struggle with the terminology and the context of the research and discussion of the book. However, the introduction to the text outright states that the book is addressed to librarians and faculty.

The text overall is consistently structured from chapter to chapter. While the chapters are authored by various professionals and written in various formats, the themes and terminology are consistent throughout.

The text is quite easily divisible. It is broken into four parts that could be used individually. Since each chapter is essentially a standalone article, the chapters could be extracted and used as individual readings. The discipline specific research (i.e. education and economics) in certain chapters could be useful on their own for faculty in those areas. Occasionally, a chapter references a previous chapter in the book, which might necessitate some editing. Some of the sample assignments and activities for students within the chapters could be easily reworked and used by instructors. Also, the examples of institutional information literacy frameworks could be of great use to readers.

The overarching focus of each of the four parts of the book are organized in a way that is logical and easily navigated by professionals. The text sets the stage for information literacy, then takes the reader through a coherent discussion of the incorporation of information literacy in specific disciplines and institution-wide. Though chapters jump from one research project to another, the connections between the articles is clear to the reader and the chapters flow logically.

The PDF version of the text was not hyperlinked at all, which requires scrolling through the entire book. The epub version was easily navigable with hyperlinked chapters. Neither version offers an index or glossary.

No grammatical errors of note.

Since the authors are from various backgrounds and the research takes place at a variety of institutions, the book is quite inclusive. The research focus of the chapters are varied in discipline, inherently offering a wide variety of results and discussion. The text also included some international contributors from New Zealand and Belize, lending breadth to the research. The contributors list at the end of the text offers a long list of contributors and their institutions.

While not a textbook for undergraduate students, the information is useful for graduate students in library programs or for faculty who are interested in incorporating information literacy. This is an outstanding book for professional information literacy librarians. The text is an in-depth introduction for instructors to include information literacy in their courses, program-wide, and at the institution level. There is a lot of value in this book for instructors in terms of understanding the context and use of information literacy in various disciplines. The text illustrates ways in which courses, programs, and institutions are successfully incorporating information literacy.

Reviewed by Cori Biddle, Learning Services Librarian, Bridgewater College on 2/21/19

The subtitle of this book, "Research and Collaboration Across the Disciplines," appears to a bit misleading, considering the books place in the series, Perspectives on Writing. A majority of the articles focus on first year and introductory... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

The subtitle of this book, "Research and Collaboration Across the Disciplines," appears to a bit misleading, considering the books place in the series, Perspectives on Writing. A majority of the articles focus on first year and introductory courses, which is consistent with a Writing Studies context. However, there are a few chapters that cover Economics, Sociology, and other disciplines. This may lead to the "across disciplines" claim. It would be easier to assess the chapter's disciplines if the authors' positions were listed along with their institutions. The chapters do a well enough job covering a majority of the information literacy issues related to first year programs, and initiating an institution wide initiative. It especially serves as a good introduction to the changes related to the switch from the Information Literary Standards to the Framework for Information Literacy. There is no index or glossary in the text, which would have been helpful, especially for those new to Information Literacy, or interested in a particular aspect.

The text appears to be accurate and there is little perceived bias. One could technically argue that the book's premise, that Information Literacy is an essential part of higher education curriculum, could be a bit bias. The book does not include any chapters that argue against that claim. Each chapter provides an extensive reference list for cross-checking the information and for identifying additional resources to review.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

This text is relevant as a resource for faculty and staff trying to integrate Information Literacy into the curriculum. However, its 2016 copyright is already showing its age. The Framework has been in place for 3 years as of this review, so newer research should be available on its use in the higher education curriculum. Updating the book may be somewhat difficult, involving rewriting entire chapters or soliciting new chapters. Some chapters seem to hold up better than others, with some references feeling dated.

Clarity rating: 3

The language is accessible to faculty and staff, though individuals from disciplines other than Writing Studies and Libraries may have difficultly with the level of jargon. Though the Framework is defined many times throughout the text, definitions for certain concepts or terminology could have been more clear. As with any text made up of chapters with varying authors, the clarity and quality varies in each.

Consistency rating: 3

Due to the multi-author nature of the text, consistency can be an issue. The structure of each chapter varies, as does the clarity. Overall, the authors did make an effort to refer to each others chapters within their arguments, and to provide a definition of the Framework and other important terms within their own work.

Assigning the entire text to a faculty or staff group may not be appropriate, but the chapters in this text are highly modular. They can stand alone, or be presented in alternate orders to serve the individual need of the committee or group. Though some chapters reference others from the collection, they provide enough context that it is not necessary to read the other chapters to understand their argument.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 2

The organization of the text becomes a little problematic in the middle. The titles of sections two and three, and their content, seem a little vague. Overall, it is hard to predict the type of information found in them. Often times, the chapters could fit in either section, or neither of them. The structures of section one and four feel a little more concrete, but even so, some of the chapters in section one feel just as home in sections two or three.

I did not experience any interface issues or problems when accessing the text.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

There were a few grammatical errors with the text.

The content of this text should be accessible to a variety of cultural groups, and I did not perceive any culturally insensitive content.

This title is not a textbook in the traditional sense. Instead of a text that provides a cohesive list of strategies or an exploration of the Framework in a variety of distinct contexts, this title is a loosely grouped collection of chapters dealing with information literacy. The content of the book leans towards Writing Studies Professionals, those working with first-year writing and writing across the curriculum for example. Despite this, individual chapters could be useful for those in a variety of disciplines. This text would be most useful for an institutional working group or a committee that is charged with integrating information literacy into the curriculum, or as professional development for faculty who are interested in integrating information literacy into their course work. It would be less useful in an undergraduate information literacy class, or in a graduate level Library Science or Writing Studies course.

Reviewed by Andrew Kulp, Information Literacy and Undergraduate Studies Librarian, Shenandoah University on 5/21/18

This is not a comprehensive approach to information literacy research or collaboration across disciplines, nor does it claim to be one. Instead of broadly illuminating the book’s titular concerns, these chapters shine focused spotlights on a... read more

This is not a comprehensive approach to information literacy research or collaboration across disciplines, nor does it claim to be one. Instead of broadly illuminating the book’s titular concerns, these chapters shine focused spotlights on a sampling of issues, discussions, and studies, unified by facets of 2015’s Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

This book would benefit from an index, but the PDF files are easily searchable in their present arrangement. Even though the book is peppered with privileged terminology, a glossary will not be missed, since Google is usually one tab away from the reader.

No errors were observed in the content of this book.

The only perceived bias was that of the place of information literacy in the university curriculum. The authors in this text posit that information literacy deserves an equal standing with other disciplines or at least a secure place within each discipline.

This book is relevant to higher education in 2018. Its underlying theme is the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education and Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education documents from 2015. These guidelines should be influential for several years to come, but will eventually be replaced by the next new recommendation.

Updating the book to remain relevant to advancing technologies and pedagogies would be difficult. Far more useful would be a second edition that addresses new information literacy topics with updated perspectives and renewed inquiry.

The longevity of this collection varies from one chapter to the next. For example, chapter twelve’s discussion on the value and use of infographics as emerging content delivery and assessment pieces is already dated. Similarly, chapter four’s insightful handling of our modern research environment of competing levels of accuracy and authority is weakened by the chapter title: "Creating and Exploring New Worlds: Web 2.0, Information Literacy, and the Ways We Know." “Web 2.0” is the timestamp for a specific generation of websites, and limits this chapter’s longevity.

Overall, the book’s language is accessible to faculty, university librarians, and graduate-level students, which are the targeted readers for these topics. Jargon and technical terminology are plentiful, but almost always within an adequate context for the target audience of this book.

It is doubtful that a reader who is unfamiliar with higher education writing, research, and library terminology or issues would benefit from this book. For example, a chemistry or communications professor interested in improving an undergraduate research assignment might encounter this book as a wall of acronyms and impenetrable discussions of "Frameworks" and "Outcomes."

Any book with this many authors will struggle with consistency. The editors have succeeded in smoothing out the difficulties that can arise between disciplines and approaches.

This book would benefit immensely from a description of each author’s role or position, as well as their institutional affiliation. Knowing the authors’ disciplines would lend context to their terminologies and perspectives.

This book is highly modular; each chapter easily stands alone. Instructors could assign any chapter as a course reading, exactly like assigning individual articles. Similarly, the four major parts of the book could be approached individually. Several chapters across this book could be reorganized into new sections with common themes or approaches to information literacy. The text is not overly self-referential; each chapter approaches its topic without consideration of the other chapters.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

The major sections of the book progress from positioning information literacy in its pedagogical context to collaborating across higher education to promote information literacy implementation. This intuitive approach to the subject suffers from a poor organization in the middle of the book, specifically the lack of cohesion in the chapters that comprise Parts II and III.

Part II: Researching Information Literacy (chapters 6-10) is too generic a category for the overall objective of the book or the chapters in this section. Every chapter in the book deals with researching information literacy in some form; these chapters could have been organized to reflect a more nuanced dissection of the book’s theme. Part III: Incorporating and Evaluating Information Literacy in Specific Courses (chapters 11-15) seems to act as a catch-all for chapters that fit together only loosely.

Within their larger sections, each chapter is placed amid chapters with similar enough topics, though to say that one chapter flows naturally to the next would be an overstatement.

This book is displayed clearly on both desktop and mobile browsers. The text and few graphics are easy to read with no distracting abnormalities. Navigation was mostly straightforward and simple. However, instead of forcing the reader to navigate conflicting book and PDF page numbers, the PDF option would benefit immensely from a linked table of contents, similar to the ePUB format.

The text contains no observed grammatical errors.

The content, language, and approaches to information literacy presented here should be accessible to any diverse university community. No cultural insensitivity was observed in this text.

This book buries the title's “collaboration” lede. Instructors or librarians seeking an organized, authoritative collection of strategies to enable collaboration across disciplines may be disappointed that this is not a textbook in the traditional sense. Readers will instead encounter 20 loosely-related chapters, each addressing separate topics while considering the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education and Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education documents from 2015. For many, this may diminish the book’s usefulness in the classroom.

Reviewed by Teagan Decker, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Pembroke on 2/1/18

The book covers an important topic in its interdisciplinary complexity. As a writing teacher, I appreciate the multiple perspectives this collection brings to a topic that affects students and teachers across disciplines. Multiple aspects of... read more

The book covers an important topic in its interdisciplinary complexity. As a writing teacher, I appreciate the multiple perspectives this collection brings to a topic that affects students and teachers across disciplines. Multiple aspects of information literacy are covered, and I believe that most readers involved in college-level teaching will find a topic of interest here.

The text represents my field (writing studies) in a fair and informed fashion. This gives me confidence that other fields, especially library/information science, are also represented well.

The content is quite relevant to the evolving fields of both writing studies and library/information science.

Although multiple authors have contributed to the book, the clarity and readability is uniform throughout.

I found it helpful that the text uses key references throughout as touchstones: the "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education" and the "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing."

The 20 chapters in the collection allow for specific topics to be addressed in each. These could be useful to assign in courses where the full text would not be practical.

All chapters are clearly titled so that readers can choose topics of interest. The entire collection is organized in a clear and understandable manner.

There are no problems with the book's interface.

The book reads smoothly with few, if any, typographical errors.

The text demonstrates cultural sensitivity.

Reviewed by Jill Stefaniak, Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University on 2/8/17

I really like that this textbook addresses information sources as they apply to different technologies and web platforms. It addresses today's needs and provides examples to help the reader determine appropriate information sources. read more

I really like that this textbook addresses information sources as they apply to different technologies and web platforms. It addresses today's needs and provides examples to help the reader determine appropriate information sources.

I think the authors have done an excellent job providing an objective book addressing the nuances associated with information literacy. They provide the reader with lots of examples to explain how, when, and why to use certain sources other overs.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

The text is up-to-date addressing a variety of web tools that are used when seeking information. I have not seen a book that addresses information literacy in general and expands on how sources can be found using a variety of tools and platforms.

The text is written clearly and uses consistent terminology throughout.

The book does a great job using consistency as it explains information literacy through various technological lenses. With today's every changing technology, the authors do a great job to help the reader identify and discern between different information sources.

Modularity rating: 4

This book is organized into several chapters that address a variety of topics. The authors have done an excellent job demonstrating how information literacy is valued across disciplines. This is an excellent book for courses that have students representing different majors.

The book is certainly organized so that it increases in complexity. I particularly appreciate that emphasis has been placed on alignment between information sources and the focus of a given project.

The interface is very clear. It's very easy to navigate through the open textbook.

the text contains no grammatical errors.

The book provides a variety of examples that can be found in different academic disciplines. The examples provided a suitable for an introductory course on information literacy.

Reviewed by Cheryl Knott, Associate Professor, University of Arizona on 2/8/17

The book is partitioned into four sections that together provide a comprehensive treatment of the broad topic of information literacy across different subject disciplines. The editors provide a helpful introduction explaining how they... read more

The book is partitioned into four sections that together provide a comprehensive treatment of the broad topic of information literacy across different subject disciplines. The editors provide a helpful introduction explaining how they conceptualized the book and what the book's purpose is. The introduction offers an excellent discussion of the "Information Literacy Standards" issued in 2000 by the Association of College and Research Libraries and the association's more recent development of a "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education" addressing the changed context of information seeking and discovery and the changed relationship of students to information as both consumers and producers. Although there is no index, readers of the pdf can easily use a keyboard command to find keywords throughout the text. No glossary is included, but since the book's readers will mostly be teaching and library faculty familiar with information literacy topics, that is not an issue, and, in any case, terms are defined as they are introduced throughout the book.

Information provided is up-to-date and accurate. The diversity of the chapter authors and the involvement of four editors help ensure a balanced, error-free, and unbiased presentation of material.

The book coincides with the new "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education" issued by the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2015. Because the framework can be understood as a rethinking and revising of the 2000 standards, it likely will be used and referred to for years to come. Consequently, the book can be seen as a thorough consideration of information literacy at a watershed moment. The book's combined breadth and depth and its connection to a major advance in the theory and practice of information literacy acquisition indicate it will be useful for many years.

The text is clearly written, with helpful subheadings and, in some chapters, helpful graphic elements that illustrate or supplement the text.

The editors have done a very good job of keeping the work consistent and cohesive within each of the four topical sections and throughout the book as a whole.

The book is well organized. Its division into four sections will make it possible for some users to focus on one aspect of a broad subject. For example, instructors, librarians, and graduate students interested in designing and carrying out research on some aspect of information literacy may choose to read only the introduction and the five chapters that constitute the research section of the book.

The arrangement of the sections and chapters support the reader's development of a deep understanding of the history, theory, and practice of information literacy as a collaboration by different categories of professionals across a variety of academic subject areas. Although each of the book's sections and each chapter can stand on its own, reading the sections and chapters in the order given allows a reader to build knowledge from the conceptual/theoretical to the empirical/practical.

The text and graphic elements are clearly displayed.

No grammatical errors appear to be present in the text.

Although there are some references to race and ethnicity, the book does not offer systematic coverage of the current discussion of "critical information literacy" and its relationship to social justice.

Given the "collaboration across disciplines" focus of the book, it is surprising that the list of contributors indicates only where the various authors work but not in what capacity. It would have been useful to include titles and departments as a way to represent the variety of perspectives expressed in the text.

Table of Contents

• Front Matter
• Introduction, Barbara J. D'Angelo, Sandra Jamieson, Barry Maid, and Janice R. Walker

Part I. Situating Information Literacy

• Chapter 1. Writing Information Literacy: A Retrospective and a Look Ahead, Rolf Norgaard and Caroline Sinkinson
• Chapter 2. Threshold Concepts: Integrating and Applying Information Literacy and Writing Instruction, Barry Maid and Barbara D'Angelo
• Chapter 3. Employer Expectations of Information Literacy: Identifying the Skills Gap, Dale Cyphert and Stanley P. Lyle
• Chapter 4. Creating and Exploring New Worlds: Web 2.0, Information Literacy, and the Ways We Know, Kathleen Blake Yancey
• Chapter 5. Information Literacy in Digital Environments: Construct Mediation, Construct Modeling, and Validation Processes, Irvin R. Katz and Norbert Elliot

Part II. Researching Information Literacy

• Chapter 6. What the Citation Project Tells Us about Information Literacy in College Composition, Sandra Jamieson
• Chapter 7. Preliminary Paths to Information Literacy: Introducing Research in Core Courses, Katt Blackwell-Starnes
• Chapter 8. Approximating the University: The Information Literacy Practices of Novice Researchers, Karen Gocsik, Laura R. Braunstein, and Cynthia E. Tobery
• Chapter 9. Understanding and Using Sources: Student Practices and Perceptions, Patti Wojahn, Theresa Westbrock, Rachel Milloy, Seth Myers, Matthew Moberly, and Lisa Ramirez
• Chapter 10. Writing Information Literacy in First-Year Composition: A Collaboration among Faculty and Librarians, Donna Scheidt, William Carpenter, Robert Fitzgerald, Cara Kozma, Holly Middleton, and Kathy Shields

Part III. Incorporating and Evaluating Information Literacy in Specific Courses

• Chapter 11. Up the Mountain without a Trail: Helping Students Use Source Networks to Find Their Way, Miriam Laskin and Cynthia R. Haller
• Chapter 12. Ethics, Distribution, and Credibility: Using an Emerging Genre to Teach Information Literacy Concepts, Christopher Toth and Hazel McClure
• Chapter 13. Information Literacy Preparation of Pre-Service and Graduate Educators, Susan Brown and Janice R. Walker
• Chapter 14. Not Just for Citations: Assessing Zotero While Reassessing Research, Rachel Rains Winslow, Sarah L. Skripsky, and Savannah L. Kelly
• Chapter 15. Quantitative Reasoning and Information Literacy in Economics, Diego Méndez-Carbajo

Part IV. Collaborating to Advance Programmatic Information Literacy

• Chapter 16. Moving Ahead by Looking Back: Crafting a Framework for Sustainable, Institutional Information Literacy, Lori Baker and Pam Gladis
• Chapter 17. Supporting Academics to Embed Information Literacy to Enhance Students' Research and Writing Process, Angela Feekery, Lisa Emerson, and Gillian Skyrme
• Chapter 18. Building Critical Researchers and Writers Incrementally: Vital Partnerships Between Faculty and Librarians, Alison S. Gregory and Betty L. McCall
• Chapter 19. Impacting Information Literacy through Alignment, Resources, and Assessment, Beth Bensen, Denise Woetzel, Hong Wu, and Ghazala Hashmi
• Chapter 20. Bridging the Gaps: Collaboration in a Faculty and Librarian Community of Practice on Information Literacy, Francia Kissel, Melvin R. Wininger, Scott R. Weeden, Patricia A. Wittberg, Randall S. Halverson, Meagan Lacy, and Rhonda K. Huisman
• Afterword, Trudi E. Jacobson
• Contributors

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This collection brings together scholarship and pedagogy from multiple perspectives and disciplines, offering nuanced and complex perspectives on Information Literacy in the second decade of the 21st century. Taking as a starting point the concerns that prompted the Association of Research Libraries (ACRL) to review the Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education and develop the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2015), the chapters in this collection consider six frameworks that place students in the role of both consumer and producer of information within today's collaborative information environments. Contributors respond directly or indirectly to the work of the ACRL, providing a bridge between past/current knowledge and the future and advancing the notion that faculty, librarians, administrators, and external stakeholders share responsibility and accountability for the teaching, learning, and research of Information Literacy.

About the Contributors

Barry Maid is Professor and Founding Head of the Technical Communication Program at Arizona State University. He was head of that program for ten years. Previously, he was Chair of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where he helped lead the creation of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters primarily focusing on technology, independent writing programs, and program administration including assessment. He and Barbara D'Angelo have written multiple articles on information literacy and writing. In addition, he is a co-author, with Duane Roen and Greg Glau, of The McGraw-Hill Guide: Writing for College, Writing for Life.

Barbara J. D'Angelo is Clinical Associate Professor of Technical Communication at Arizona State University and Graduate Advisor for the MS in Technical Communication Program. She formerly served as Director of Assessment and Curriculum for the undergraduate technical communication degree program and coordinated a multi-section professional writing course for nurses. She has presented and published on topics related to information literacy, technical communication, writing assessment, and curriculum development at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Association for Business Communication annual convention, and the International Writing Across the Disciplines conference among others. She is the recipient of the 2011 Francis W. Weeks Award of Merit from the Association for Business Communication.

Sandra Jamieson is Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Drew University, where she teaches first-year writing and writing studies and pedagogy courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. She is one of three principal researchers in the Citation Project, a multi-site quantitative and qualitative study of student source-use practices. Her publications include the co-edited collection Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum (with Shamoon, Howard, and Schwegler—winner of the Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Book of the Year Award, 2000-2001) and The Bedford Guide to Writing in the Disciplines: An Instructor's Desk Reference (with Rebecca Moore Howard). She has published articles and chapters on information literacy, research, plagiarism, reading, the writing major, writing across the curriculum, the vertical writing curriculum, textbooks, and multicultural education.

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Phase Two: The Reach

• Posted May 7, 2024
• By Ryan Nagelhout
• Evidence-Based Intervention
• Language and Literacy Development
• Learning Design and Instruction
• Student Achievement and Outcomes

When Reach Every Reader was launched in 2018 with the lofty goal of ending the early literacy crisis and improving reading outcomes for children in the United States, researchers adhered to a simple refrain about the project’s aims: serve science, serve people. 

A partnership between the Ed School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Integrated Learning Initiative, and the Florida Center for Reading Research and College of Communication & Information at Florida State University, Reach Every Reader is now reaching the end of its first phase, which included work in 47 states reaching more than 58,000 children, 28,000 educators, and 7,000 parents and caregivers through research studies and offering public resources. 

Each team in the partnership tackled a different aspect. At the Ed School, Professor James Kim ’s READS Lab partnered with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina to develop the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) , a set of tools focused on improving students’ ability to read for understanding in science, social studies, and English. “The message from our study is that it’s not just reading, it’s reading complex nonfiction text. That’s the reading crisis in America,” says Kim. “In order to help kids do that, you need to have all those basic skills, but you really have to build background and vocabulary knowledge. And that’s what our program did well.” 

Kim worked as an adviser with the district before Reach Every Reader began, but the grant that funded Reach Every Reader allowed for MOREs development and implementation. The MORE program features a “spiral” curriculum about science topics that builds upon itself as students matriculate from first to third grade. 

The research showed improvement in third grade reading comprehension as well as math testing, which Kim described as a “really exciting” transfer of skills Reach Every Reader hopes to replicate in other districts during its next phase. The project recently received a federal Education, Innovation, and Research grant that will allow MORE programming to expand into 100 different school districts around the country in the next five years. 

“The message from our study is that it’s not just reading, it’s reading complex nonfiction text. That’s the reading crisis in America.” Professor James Kim

Kim described a student’s reading ability by third grade as a “very sticky indicator” of a variety of student outcomes, which is often why those metrics garner so much focus. 

“If you’re not reading proficiently by third grade, you’re more likely to drop out of high school, you’re less likely to be college and career ready,” Kim says. “There are all kinds of downstream consequences of not being ready to read. But you can’t solve the problem in third grade, you have to start earlier.” 

The urgency of the literacy crisis was only amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in the middle of MORE's research phase. That crisis — and the impact the pandemic had on learning loss and schools struggling to help students — presented the team with a choice: continue to provide the intervention to just the treatment group, as planned, or disrupt the original research focus and offer it to all students in the district. Kim and his team chose to help all students. 

“When you have extreme circumstances like the pandemic, you’re faced with more extreme choices,” says Senior Lecturer Elizabeth City, Ed.M.'04, Ed.D.'07, Reach Every Reader’s executive director. “We landed on, ‘We’re going to serve people, and then we’re going to figure out how to serve science from there.’” 

City raved about the MORE team’s ability to be “nimble” in responding to the pandemic’s challenges, a “beautiful example” of the tension that comes with putting research into practice. 

“One of the hardest things in academia is to have really rigorous research that actually gets into practice and makes a difference for learners,” says City. “We were able to do incredibly rigorous research and also help people in real time. I think Jimmy’s team is our very best example of that.” 

City noted the “enormous amounts of work left to do” in the field, but also working to scale the MORE programming in new school districts is a huge step forward for the project’s next phase. She pointed to something a Reach Every Reader colleague from Florida State likes to say about the work as it enters year six. 

“Phase one was about the reader, and phase two is about the reach,” City recited. “Really trying to understand what’s going to work for every reader is phase one. Now let’s get the reach.”

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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We’re All Reading Wrong

To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud.

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Updated at 4:32 p.m. ET on May 3, 2024

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline , improve sleep , and lower blood pressure . In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library , in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read The house of healing for the soul .

But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century , when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other.

But what those earlier readers didn’t yet know was that all of that verbal reading offered additional benefits: It can boost the reader’s mood and ability to recall . It can lower parents’ stress and increase their warmth and sensitivity toward their children. To reap the full benefits of reading, we should be doing it out loud, all the time, with everyone we know.

Reading aloud is a distinctive cognitive process, more complex than simply reading silently, speaking, or listening. Noah Forrin, who researched memory and reading at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, told me that it involves several operations—motor control, hearing, and self-reference (the fact that you said it)—all of which activate the hippocampus, a brain region associated with episodic memory. Compared with reading silently, the hippocampus is more active while reading aloud, which might help explain why the latter is such an effective memory tool. In a small 2012 study , students who studied a word list remembered 90 percent of the words they’d read aloud immediately afterward, compared with 71 percent of those they’d read silently. (One week later, participants remembered 59 percent of the spoken words and 48 percent of the words read silently.)

So although you might enjoy an audiobook narrated by Meryl Streep, you would remember it better if you read parts of it out loud—especially if you did so in small chunks, just a short passage at a time, Forrin said. The same goes for a few lines of a presentation that you really want to nail. Those memory benefits hold true whether or not anyone is around to hear your performance.

Verbal reading without an audience is, in fact, surprisingly common. While studying how modern British people read aloud, Sam Duncan, a professor of adult literacies at University College London, found that they read aloud—and alone—for a variety of reasons. One woman recited Welsh poetry to remember her mother, with whom she spoke Welsh as a girl. One young man read the Quran out loud before work to better understand its meaning. Repeating words aloud isn’t just key to memorization, Duncan told me—it can be key to identity formation too.

From the August 1904 issue: On reading aloud

Plenty of solitary vocal reading no doubt consists of deciphering recipes and proofreading work emails, but if you want to reap the full perks, the best selections are poetry and literature. These genres provide access to facets of human experience that can be otherwise unreachable, which helps us process our own emotions and memories, says Philip Davis, an emeritus professor of literature and psychology at the University of Liverpool. Poetry, for example, can induce peak emotional responses , a strong reaction that might include goose bumps or chills. It can help you locate an emotion within yourself, which is important to health as a form of emotional processing.

Poetry also contains complex, unexpected elements, like when Shakespeare uses god as a verb in Coriolanus : “This last old man … godded me.” In an fMRI study that Davis co-authored in 2015, such literary surprise was shown to be stimulating to the brain. Davis told me that literature, with its “mixture of memory and imagination,” can cause us to recall our most complex experiences and derive meaning from them. A poem or story read aloud is particularly enthralling, he said, because it becomes a live presence in the room, with a more direct and penetrative quality, akin to live music. Davis likens the role of literature and live reading to a spark or renewal, “a bringing of things back to life.”

Discussing the literature that you read aloud can be particularly valuable. Davis told me doing so helps penetrate rigid thinking and can dislodge dysfunctional thought patterns. A qualitative 2017 study led by Josie Billington at the University of Liverpool found that, for those who have chronic pain and the depression that tends to come with it, such discussion expands emotional vocabulary —a key tenet of psychological well-being— perhaps even more so than cognitive behavioral therapy . (The allure of an audience has one notable exception: If you’re anxious, reading aloud can actually reduce memory and comprehension . To understand this effect, one need only harken back to fifth grade when it was your turn to read a paragraph on Mesopotamia in class.)

Read: How to keep your book club from becoming a wine club

The health benefits of reading aloud are so profound that some doctors in England now refer their chronic-pain patients to read-aloud groups. Helen Cook, a 45-year-old former teacher in England, joined one of these groups in 2013. Cook had a pelvic tumor that had sent anguish ricocheting through her hip and back for a decade, and medication never seemed to help. Before she joined the reading group, Cook had trouble sleeping, lost her job, and “had completely lost myself,” she told me. Then, she and nine other adults began working their way through some 300 pages of Hard Times , by Charles Dickens.

Cook told me she recognized her experience in the characters’ travails, and within months, she “rediscovered a love for life,” even returning to college for a master’s degree in literature. She’s not the only one who found relief: In Billington’s 2017 study, everyone who read aloud in a group felt emotionally better and reported less pain for two days afterward.

Hearing words read aloud to you also has unique advantages, especially for kids. Storytelling has been shown to increase hospitalized children’s levels of oxytocin while decreasing cortisol and pain. Julie Hunter, who for more than 20 years has taught preschool kids (including my daughter), told me that interactive reading increases young children’s comprehension , builds trust , and enhances social-emotional skills . A recent study by researchers at the Brookings Institution found that children smiled and laughed more when being read to by a parent than when listening to an automatically narrated book alone.

Read: An ode to being read to

Anecdotal evidence suggests that adults, too, can benefit from such listening. For 25 years, Hedrick and Susan Smith, ages 90 and 84, respectively, have read more than 170 books aloud. They started by reading in the car, to pass the time, but it was so much fun that they started reading every night before they turned out the light, Hedrick told me. Together, they tried to comprehend One Hundred Years of Solitude , narrated Angela’s Ashes in four different Irish accents, and deduced clues in John le Carré thrillers. They felt more connected, and went to sleep in brighter moods. If they liked the book, they couldn’t wait for the other to read the next chapter aloud—even, and perhaps especially, when the sound of the other’s voice sent them off to sleep.

Due to an editing error, this article originally misidentified the author of a 2017 study.

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An Appraisal

Alice Munro, a Literary Alchemist Who Made Great Fiction From Humble Lives

The Nobel Prize-winning author specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope, spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

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By Gregory Cowles

Gregory Cowles is a senior editor at the Book Review.

The first story in her first book evoked her father’s life. The last story in her last book evoked her mother’s death. In between, across 14 collections and more than 40 years, Alice Munro showed us in one dazzling short story after another that the humble facts of a single person’s experience, subjected to the alchemy of language and imagination and psychological insight, could provide the raw material for great literature.

And not just any person, but a girl from the sticks. It mattered that Munro, who died on Monday night at the age of 92, hailed from rural southwestern Ontario, since so many of her stories, set in small towns on or around Lake Huron, were marked by the ambitions of a bright girl eager to leave, upon whom nothing is lost. There was the narrator of “Boys and Girls,” who tells herself bedtime stories about a world “that presented opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice, as mine never did.” There was Rose, from “The Beggar Maid,” who wins a college scholarship and leaves her working-class family behind. And there was Del Jordan, from “Lives of Girls and Women” — Munro’s second book, and the closest thing she ever wrote to a novel — who casts a jaundiced eye on her town’s provincial customs as she takes the first fateful steps toward becoming a writer.

Does it seem reductive or limiting to derive a kind of artist’s statement from the title of that early book? It shouldn’t. Munro was hardly a doctrinaire feminist, but with implacable authority and command she demonstrated throughout her career that the lives of girls and women were as rich, as tumultuous, as dramatic and as important as the lives of men and boys. Her plots were rife with incident: the threatened suicide in the barn, the actual murder at the lake, the ambivalent sexual encounter, the power dynamics of desire. For a writer whose book titles gestured repeatedly at love (“The Progress of Love,” “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”), her narratives recoiled from sentimentality. Tucked into the stately columns of The New Yorker, where she was a steady presence for decades, they were far likelier to depict the disruptions and snowballing consequences of petty grudges, careless cruelties and base impulses: the gossip that mattered.

Munro’s stories traveled not as the crow flies but as the mind does. You got the feeling that, if the GPS ever offered her a shorter route, she would decline. Capable of dizzying swerves in a line or a line break, her stories often spanned decades with intimacy and sweep; that’s partly what critics meant when they wrote of the novelistic scope she brought to short fiction.

Her sentences rarely strutted or flaunted or declared themselves; but they also never clanked or stumbled — she was an exacting and precise stylist rather than a showy one, who wrote with steely control and applied her ambitions not to language but to theme and structure. (This was a conscious choice on her part: “In my earlier days I was prone to a lot of flowery prose,” she told an interviewer when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013. “I gradually learned to take a lot of that out.”) In the middle of her career her stories started to grow roomier and more contemplative, even essayistic; they could feel aimless until you approached the final pages and recognized with a jolt that they had in fact been constructed all along as intricately and deviously as a Sudoku puzzle, every piece falling neatly into place.

There was a signature Munro tone: skeptical, ruminative, given to a crucial and artful ambiguity that could feel particularly Midwestern. Consider “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which — thanks in part to Sarah Polley’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, “ Away From Her ” (2006) — may be Munro’s most famous story; it details a woman’s descent into senility and her philandering husband’s attempt to come to terms with her attachment to a male resident at her nursing home. Here the husband is on a visit, confronting the limits of his knowledge and the need to make peace with uncertainty, in a characteristically Munrovian passage:

She treated him with a distracted, social sort of kindness that was successful in holding him back from the most obvious, the most necessary question. He could not demand of her whether she did or did not remember him as her husband of nearly 50 years. He got the impression that she would be embarrassed by such a question — embarrassed not for herself but for him. She would have laughed in a fluttery way and mortified him with her politeness and bewilderment, and somehow she would have ended up not saying either yes or no. Or she would have said either one in a way that gave not the least satisfaction.

Like her contemporary Philip Roth — another realist who was comfortable blurring lines — Munro devised multilayered plots that were explicitly autobiographical and at the same time determined to deflect or undermine that impulse. This tension dovetailed happily with her frequent themes of the unreliability of memory and the gap between art and life. Her stories tracked the details of her lived experience both faithfully and cannily, cagily, so that any attempt at a dispassionate biography (notably, Robert Thacker’s scholarly and substantial “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives,” from 2005) felt at once invasive and redundant. She had been in front of us all along.

Until, suddenly, she wasn’t. That she went silent after her book “Dear Life” was published in 2012, a year before she won the Nobel, makes her passing now seem all the more startling — a second death, in a way that calls to mind her habit of circling back to recognizable moments and images in her work. At least three times she revisited the death of her mother in fiction, first in “The Peace of Utrecht,” then in “Friend of My Youth” and again in the title story that concludes “Dear Life”: “The person I would really have liked to talk to then was my mother,” the narrator says near the end of that story, in an understated gut punch of an epitaph that now applies equally well to Munro herself, but she “was no longer available.”

Gregory Cowles is the poetry editor of the Book Review and senior editor of the Books desk. More about Gregory Cowles