Wisconsin Literacy Research Symposium

UW-Stevens Point

2023 Wisconsin Literacy Research Symposium

Thursday, June 22

Join us at the 2023 Wisconsin Literacy Research Symposium as literacy experts will share with teachers and administrators their research about knowledge-building for enhancing reading comprehension. Dr. Nell Duke’s term “compreaction,” informs that reading is an active process that empowers readers for better understanding and bridging their knowledge in a real-world context with participation. With the increasing prevalence of the term “knowledge-building” in education, this symposium presents a space for dialogue to make sense of the research and the practices that facilitate the intersection of text comprehension and knowledge-building.

Daniel Reynolds, Ph.D.

Building comprehension instruction for complex texts

HyeJin Hwang, Ph.D.

Comprehension and Content Learning

HyeJin Hwang is an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Studies (Literacy, Language, and Culture) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to the doctoral program, she was a middle-school teacher who mainly worked with multilingual students to support their reading development. Dr. Hwang’s research interests revolve around comprehension and content learning in K-12 settings, particularly for multilingual students. She was the recipient of different research grants, including American Educational Research Association Dissertation Grant and American Psychological Association Division 15 Research Grant. Her work has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Scientific Studies of Reading, and AERA Open.

Courtney Hattan, Ph.D.

Reconsidering knowledge-building through a contextually and culturally responsive lens

Courtney Hattan is an incoming assistant professor in the Science of Reading at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former elementary and middle-school teacher, she earned her reading specialist degree from Johns Hopkins University in 2012 and her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Maryland in 2018. Dr. Hattan’s program of research centers on the interplay between readers’ knowledge and what they understand and remember from text. Within that program of research, Dr. Hattan has conducted analyses of reading materials used in classrooms, observed literacy instruction, and examined the effectiveness of various techniques meant to bring students’ knowledge to mind before, during, and after text processing. Dr. Hattan was the recipient of the 2019 International Literacy Association Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan Outstanding Dissertation Award and was named a Reading Hall of Fame Emerging Scholars Fellow. Her work has been published in journals such as Review of Educational Research, Reading Research Quarterly, and the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Recommended Pre-Symposium Readings

Coming soon.

Hwang, H., McMaster, K.L. and Kendeou, P. (2023), A Longitudinal Investigation of Directional Relations Between Domain Knowledge and Reading in the Elementary Years. Reading Research Quarterly, 58(1), 59-77. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.481
Hwang, H., Cabell, S. Q., & Joyner, R. E. (2022). Effects of integrated literacy and content-area instruction on vocabulary and comprehension in the elementary years: A meta-analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading, 26(3), 223–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2021.1954005
Hwang, H., Lupo, S. M., Cabell, S. Q., & Wang, S. (2021). What research says about leveraging the literacy block for learning. Reading in Virginia, 42, 35–47.

Hattan, C. & Lupo, S. (2020). Rethinking the role of knowledge in the literacy classroom. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), 283-298. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.350

Hattan, C. (2022, November 16). Whose knowledge matters in literacy instruction? Shanker Institute. https://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/whose-knowledge-matters-literacy-instruction
- This is a practitioner-friendly blog post that I wrote. It’s freely available online.

Hattan, C., Alexander, P. A., & Lupo. S. M. (2023). Leveraging what students know to make sense of texts: What the research says about prior knowledge activation. Review of Educational Research. Online first.https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543221148478
- There is a preprint version of this piece available on the Open Science Framework website: https://osf.io/q5cjy
- Dr. Hattan recommends Symposium participants read the “conclusions” section, which can be found on pp. 39-46 in the OSF preprint version.

Contact Us

Amber Garbe

Assistant Professor – Education
Reading Director
Reading Methods & Elementary Social Studies Methods

amber.garbe@uwsp.edu

View profile

Hosted by UW-Stevens Point School of Education and sponsored by Wisconsin Professors of Literacy.