About the onPAR grant project

Joe Magliano, PI; Alecia Santuzzi, co-PI; Stephen Tonks, co-PI; Karyn Higgs, Key Personnel
IES Grant no. R305A150193

A primary goal of the onPAR project is to help prepare students for college reading by better understanding the skills that make a proficient academic reader. 

There is good evidence that many students are entering college unprepared with the literacy skills needed for success (e.g., NAEP 2015). For example, the NAEP Nation’s Report Card reports on U.S. students reading achievement levels using four categories: below basic, basic, proficient and advanced. The 2015 report found that only 6% of 12th graders read at the “advanced” level and the majority (68%) read at or below the “basic” reading achievement level.

What makes some readers more college ready than others?

 Answering this question is essential for learning how to help prepare students for success. Certainly, students need to be able to successfully read and comprehend texts that are assigned to them. However, reading in college requires more than simply comprehending texts. Students need to purposefully use texts to solve problems that they are given in their courses.

What is needed is to better understand what a proficient college reader looks like, both in terms of the literacy skills they must bring to the table, and what motivates them to succeed in school and ultimately in their chosen careers.

The onPAR model of proficient academic reading

We propose a model of proficient academic reading (the onPAR model) consisting of three components that have the potential to determine students’ success: foundational skills, metacognitive skills, and motivation. 

Academic reading involves purposeful reading to solve problems (e.g., write a paper, study for a test, learn about a topic). This model proposes that to be a successful academic reader, students must possess the foundational skills that help them successful read text. They also need to have the metacognitive skills to be able to evaluate whether they are comprehending the text and know what to do if they aren’t. Finally, they must be motivated to succeed. To date, there is no direct evidence for exactly how these components work together to support student success. We have received funding from the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education to explore this issue.

In this grant, we are testing the onPAR model of proficient academic reading and its implications for understanding who is underprepared to read in college and how to help them. We continue to explore how foundational and metacognitive skills and motivation work together to support academic literacy and how these relate to college success. The project is also exploring if the model can help us understand who does and does not benefit from supplemental courses designed to help struggling college readers (called Developmental Education). It is our hope that this research will help inform the design of these courses to better serves the needs of a broad range of college students so that they can be successful in college and beyond.