Research has demonstrated that teachers who know more about the literate lives of their students outside of the classroom are more able to set up positive connections between home and school. In this article, we theorise the notion of 'deficit' discourses in education. Using two cases as examples, we seek to disrupt deficit discourses about…

Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) programs in many Ontario colleges offer adult learners who have low literacy and basic skills with opportunities to improve their employment skills as well as results on prerequisite courses for entrance into post-secondary education. LBS students encounter many challenges and require extra interpersonal…

This article emphasizes the importance of understanding local contexts to provide appropriate education for teachers about literacy instruction. The author reviews general problems that follow from extrapolating from unrepresentative research samples and the errors and deficit conceptions that follow from assuming that all cognition takes place…

The present action research study of kindergarten students, in a suburban public school classroom located in the midlands region of South Carolina, describes the ways in which a teacher-researcher developed a Structured Play Unit in her classroom that was designed to answer the following research question: "How does the implementation of a…

The widespread degradation of immigrant communities of color in the Unites States has made the correlation between racial and linguistic discrimination increasingly clear. This paper describes some of the ways that the co-construction of race and language, or raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), further marginalize children of…

Drawing from Buckingham's media education framework, this article uses content analysis to review one of the most recent and far-reaching disciplinary constructions of English in the United States, the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, in light of its engagement with larger social practices involved in text production,…

Young people's engagement with urban public space has been facing a number of obstacles that reflect a lack of understanding of their needs, values and priorities. The emergence of digital devices and social media as integral elements of youth culture adds further urgency to the need to understand how young people themselves visually articulate…

Eta-squared (?[superscript 2]) and partial eta-squared (?[subscript p][superscript 2]) are effect sizes that express the amount of variance accounted for by one or more independent variables. These indices are generally used in conjunction with ANOVA, the most commonly used statistical test in second language (L2) research (Plonsky, 2013).…

In this commentary, several core principles underlying the editorial and articles comprising the Special Issue on improving literacy engagement are identified and discussed. Those principles pertain to the multidimensional nature of literacy engagement, the explicit or implicit definitions offered for the construct, the positive contributions that…

We undertook a multiyear evaluation of the NaturePalooza Science Festival, an annual public event designed to increase science literacy and sustainability behavior, to measure impacts. Surveys conducted at the 2014 and 2015 events and 6 months after the 2015 event showed that 77%, 92%, and 100% of respondents, respectively, learned new…

When learning to read, the developing mind is likely to cluster letters into frequency-based chunks. In the current study, the authors investigated the extent to which such chunking takes place among preschoolers (N = 54) by examining the association between sensitivity to subword orthographic regularity and preschooler age. A version of the…

News literacy education has long focused on the significance of facts, sourcing, and verifiability. While these are critical aspects of news, rapidly developing emotion analytics technologies intended to respond to and even alter digital news audiences' emotions also demand that we pay greater attention to the role of emotion in news consumption.…

The importance of digital citizenship has been well recognized and integrated in standardized school curriculum. However, there are very few empirical studies that report on the success of these new initiatives. Our teaching experience suggest that students are able to perform well on exams that assess proper online conduct, but they still fail to…

This article aims to give an overview of the philosophical foundations of physical literacy (monism, existentialism, and phenomenology) and to discuss how philosophy can be operationalized in physical education practice. When translated into physical education practice, the physical literacy philosophies give credence to the view that, in schools,…

This article considers the value of physical literacy. Unequivocal support for aspects of the concept can be found in philosophy, neuroscience, social justice, the nature of human development, psychology, and sociocultural studies. These areas of support will be outlined and then related to the practical value of physical literacy in the school…