Reading Matters in Supporting Students: The Role of Complex Literacy Tasks in Academic Success

The goals of this study were to understand whether foundational or complex literacy skills predict performance in the course and subsequent early college success. The course emphasizes the preparation of students’ readiness to strategically and contextually engage in discipline-specific courses and practices. Students in a reading and study strategies course were administered assessments of proficiencies in the foundational skills of reading and complex literacy skills. The findings suggest that complex literacy skills, such as those foregrounded in this course, correlated with student success (as measured by the cumulative GPA) for the subsequent three semesters. A major implication of this study is that successful college reading requires the ability to engage in complex, strategic, and contextualized tasks appropriate to the specific reading tasks at hand. Colleges may benefit from providing these spaces and structures for students to learn these contextualized literacy skills.