From the Editors

Abstract

Dear Colleagues, In this issue, the authors explore some fascinating topics in literacy, ranging from an innovative professional development program for teachers to an examination of the challenges in writing performance. Each of these studies examined topics relevant to researchers and practitioners and engaged in rigorous analysis of both quantitative and qualitative research. In the first article, Amendum, Bratsch-Hines, and Vernon-Feagans examine the efficacy of a professional development and early reading intervention program delivered through webcam technology. Conceivably, if such a technology is effective, it could provide a scalable and affordable strategy for professional development. Classrooms were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions, with treatment teachers receiving one-to-one sessions of professional development for approximately 15 minutes per day. Results of the study show some promising findings: Classrooms with a high number of English learners significantly outperformed their peers in the control classrooms on word-level measures with substantial effect sizes. This study provides some important implications for future professional development to consider. The second article addresses the important issue of discussion, knowing that language-rich classrooms are essential for children's development. Boardman, Boelé, and Klingner used a multistrategy reading approach described as Collaborative Strategic Reading, in which students learn to apply discussion strategies in small, collaborative groups. The researchers used discourse analysis to compare the differences in teacher–student talk in business-as-usual conditions compared with the more collaborative model. Overall, the intervention was more effective, supporting a more dialogic model of discussion in which students appeared to take ownership of the discussion instead of the teacher. These results suggest an interesting and important strategy for promoting greater interaction in classroom discussions. Cho, Woodward, and Li turn to the important issues of how the beliefs that adolescent readers hold about knowledge and knowing are activated in the online reading context. The research centered on the patterns of readers’ epistemic processes. Observing how high school students performed on a critical online reading task, the researchers examined 10 more successful readers compared with 10 less successful readers. The results indicated that the more successful online readers tended to engage in higher order epistemic processing, whereas the less successful readers tended to function at a more surface level. The researchers found that epistemic processes tended to operate interactively, suggesting some important implications for research and practice. The topic of academic language has taken center stage in recent years, largely as a result of the Common Core State Standards. Meneses and her colleagues examined this important topic for monolingual Spanish-speaking adolescent readers in Chile. Despite great improvements throughout the country, adolescents still struggle with reading comprehension. In English, core academic-language skills (CALS) have been found to significantly contribute to reading comprehension. Consequently, the researchers developed two psychometrically reliable tests, the Spanish CALS instrument and the Spanish Academic Vocabulary Test to explore the dimensionality of core academic-language proficiencies and to examine the contribution of core academic language to reading comprehension. The research showed that the aggregated scores predicted reading comprehension. It also provided additional evidence that academic language is a critical skill in developing reading comprehension, supporting the need for interventions in academic language for Spanish-speaking adolescents. The last article in this issue addresses the cognitive and motivational challenges in writing. This research is particularly timely, given the fact that elementary students often lack the essential writing skills to be successful in school. De Smedt and colleagues examined how cognitive and motivational challenges mediate and correlate with students’ writing performance and how these relations might vary according to gender. Engaging a large sample of fifth- and sixth-grade students, the researchers examined writing self-efficacy, motivation, and strategies. The research suggested an important interplay between motivational and cognitive challenges related to students’ writing performance. Consequently, it highlights the importance of motivation and the need to study writing models for different groups of students. We hope that you will find this issue enlightening, as Reading Research Quarterly continues to highlight both rigorous qualitative and quantitative research that is at the cutting edge in our field. Susan B. Neuman Linda B. Gambrell