The Continued Need for Strategy Investigations: College Readers’ Use of PILLAR

Abstract

The authors report on a think‐aloud study of college students placed into developmental reading courses as they learned and implemented a new strategy device. The purpose was to investigate the device's potential utility for students, especially given the current practical trends in the field to move away from strategy instruction. Findings suggest that while reading textbook chapters in biology and history, the participants drew on existing text knowledge, awareness of disciplinary text differences, and awareness of metacognitive processes. The participants demonstrated that they were aware of their reliance on prior knowledge (of text structure and organization, of disciplinary differences, and of content knowledge) and also of gaps in their prior knowledge. This speaks to the need for empirical research on strategy devices, such as PILLAR, for new‐to‐college learners.

Embracing Difficulty across the Disciplines: The Difficulty Paper as a Tool for Building Disciplinary Literacy

“…There is a dearth of empirical explorations and insights into the ways in which generic and discipline-specific strategies can be adapted to the increased difficulty in college reading (Theriault et al 2018). In recent years, there has been a wealth of empirical research on these strategies in primary and secondary education, and the scholarship focused on teaching and learning in higher education would benefit from insights on the efficacy of these strategies at the postsecondary level (Porter 2017;Cisco 2016).…”