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Wisconsin Literacy Research Symposium

School of Education
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.

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Daniel Reynolds Ph.D.

Daniel Reynolds, Ph.D.

  • Building comprehension instruction for complex texts

Dan Reynolds is an associate professor and chair of the department of Education at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio. He has taught high school English and reading in Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee and Ohio. He received his doctorate in Language, Literacy and Culture from Vanderbilt University in 2017. His research interests focus on all aspects of adolescent literacy, with particular focuses on (1) translating adolescent literacy research to practice, (2) scaffolding students’ comprehension of complex texts across ELA, history, and science, and (3) the promise and pitfalls of high school Tier II reading intervention classes. He will receive the Michael Pressly Award for a Promising Scholar in the Education Field from the Alliance for Catholic Education, and he received the Literacy Research Association’s Student Outstanding Research Award. His work has been funded by Reading Reimagined and the Ohio Department of Education. He has published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Research in Reading, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique. 

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.

HyeJin Hwang, Ph.D.
Courtney Hattan, Ph.D.

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.

Ana Soler, Ph.D. (Lunch & Learn Keynote)

  • Advancing Equity for Linguistically Gifted Students: Strengthening Bridges through Cultural Connections

Ana Soler is the chairperson of the National Association of Educational Translators and Interpreters of Spoken Languages and founder of SeSo, Inc., a source of qualified and trained interpreters, and multicultural family engagement workshops for school districts. She completed her degree in social work at Georgia State University, her master’s degree in public health at Emory University, and is a Ph.D. in Special Education student at the University of Georgia. For over a decade, Ana worked with the largest school district in Georgia as the Language Services and Parent Outreach Coordinator, developing, implementing and evaluating professional development opportunities for multilingual personnel, as well as discovering endless opportunities to engage multilingual families in their children’s education. Ana has authored interpreter training curricula nationally including the Intercultural Parent and Youth Leadership Program, the Interpretation Academy for Bilingual High School Students, the Arkansas Interpreter in Education Credential Training, a 40-hour course for medical interpreters, and online courses for the University of Georgia, including the Professional Interpreter in Education Certificate course, the Professional Interpreter in Special Education Certificate course, and the Professional Translator in Education course.

Ana Soler, a national expert on language access, will be the keynote speaker at a free presentation at UW-Stevens Point June 22.

Recommended Pre-Symposium Readings

  1. Text Sets
    This is a five-part blog post series I wrote for the University of Notre Dame Center for Literacy Education. It sketches some of the points I also discuss in my article for English Teaching: Practice and Critique. Blog Post Series (open access):
    1. Academic article citation (not open access)
  2. Scaffolding Complex Text In Action 
    This article analyzed transcripts from teams of tutors working to scaffold 11th graders’ emerging understandings of complex texts. It also includes a menu of “scaffolding moves” that teachers can draw on to help them meet students’ comprehension needs in the moment:
    1. Practitioner article citation: (not open access)
  3. Translational Science on Adolescent Literacy: Just what is “Evidence-Based” in Adolescent Literacy?
    My work focuses somewhat more on adolescents, and the very idea of what is ‘evidence-based’ is sometimes not clear, and especially so because research is constantly presenting new evidence! In 2021, I wrote a pair of articles, one for a researcher audience (the RRQ piece) and one for practitioners (the JAAL piece) that hit at the heart of what adolescent literacy instruction is actually evidence-based, and how that landscape is shifting.
    1. Academic article citation (not open access)
    2. Practitioner article citation (not open access)
      Reynolds, D. (2021). Updating practice recommendations: Taking stock of 12 years of adolescent literacy research. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 65(1), 37-46.

  1. 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
  1. 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.
  1.  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

Amber Garbe

  • Assistant Professor – Education
  • Literacy Coordinator
  • Reading Methods & Elementary Social Studies Methods
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Hosted by UW-Stevens Point School of Education and sponsored by Wisconsin Professors of Literacy.