This study examined the effect of specific disciplinary actions such as in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsion on student achievement in public high schools. School discipline data from 1291 students educated within a school district in Tennessee were obtained and analyzed against Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System…

Middle school students' ability to think critically and comprehend complex text is often challenging. Students often need additional academic support in this area. Close reading text is an instructional strategy that involves analyzing and looking at a text critically. The purpose of the qualitative phenomenological study is to examine English…

The graphic novel "Invisible" (2022) by Christina Diaz Gonzalez and Gabriela Epstein demonstrates that adolescents can create a positive difference in the world and build friendships with people different from themselves. The novel's themes, nonlinear chronology, and innovative bilingual format make "Invisible" significant and…

Recent political excursions into classroom text selections by local and national politicians and pundits have made teaching canonical texts more appealing to many school districts and teachers. In this study, we used conceptions of Derridean hospitality alongside monster theory to examine what common canonical texts teach students about who is…

Students bring cultural and linguistic richness to the English Language Arts classroom in the form of English language diversity; that being said, English Language Arts (ELA) education has traditionally privileged Standard American English (*SAE) and its related white culture rather than embrace the aforementioned diversity. With calls for more…

Writing groups have the potential to be positive academic communities, but often become problematic spaces where students go to get their writing "fixed." In this article, the authors draw on literature from peer response groups as well as social justice pedagogies to explore how teachers might develop these groups as spaces for student…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts (ELA) called for several "key shifts" in classroom instructional practice. This study combined archived video data on classroom teaching collected in 2010 with new video data on classroom teaching collected in 2018 to conduct a pre-/postexamination of the extent to which…

The purpose of this quantitative observational study was to identify the differences in high school student test scores on the ACT ELA composite tests and ACT math test for students attending school in union and unified districts in Arizona. Arizona has two options for public high school districts, 9-12 (union) and K-12 (unified). The researcher…

State assessment test scores in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics had continued to decline in a southern state in the United States over the last few years. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the difference in middle school ELA and mathematics test scores between students receiving instruction in virtual and…

This dissertation examines the connection between the English Language Arts Professional Learning Community, data analysis, and research-based instructional strategies to improve students reading levels, as measured by the Pennsylvania Literature Keystone Exam at an Urban High School. It is a mixed-method study. Data were collected from 9th -12th…

This critical content analysis draws on a dataset of contemporary young adult texts receiving awards between 2012 and 2023 to examine opportunities for religiously informed alterity for readers, which we argue can be a productive experience for building critical religious literacy in young adult readers. We argue that young adult literature can…

This study examined English Language Arts teachers' reading engagement and reading motivation and how these correlated with student achievement scores on the 2023 Georgia Milestones. The researcher used the Adult Motivation to Read Scale (Schutte & Malouff, 2007) to obtain teacher-provided data on questions pertaining to teachers' reading…

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has a partnership with NWEA for the development of the 2024 Grades 3-8 English Language Arts Tests. Teachers from across the State work with NYSED in a variety of activities to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP). The 2024 Grades 3 and 4 English Language…

The Science of Teaching Reading (STR) has received increasing attention as states continue to pass educational policy initiatives grounded in STR research. One major change resulting from STR policies is the heavy focus on the systematic instruction of phonics. Texas in particular has seen sweeping changes to their preservice teacher (PST)…

In this article, I discuss my multimodal dissertation to examine how four young adults remember a youth poetry slam as a site of healing, growth, and spirituality. I argue for critical spiritual literacies (Johnson, 2022) as an embodied, multimodal set of antiracist teaching practices that center the human spirit in literacy education. Data in…