A Note from the Editorial Team

Welcome to JCRL Issue 51.2. In this issue, we are excited to bring you five articles that cover a diverse range of topics in post-secondary literacy and learning. The articles highlighted are centered on teaching approaches and coaching strategies that are designed to help students eliminate obstacles to academic success. We hope you will enjoy these selections and look for ways to implement some of the ideas in your classrooms. As the conditions for academic reading change through technology and other elements of instruction, it becomes important to periodically reassess student and faculty attitudes toward reading. Tiffany Culver and Scott Hutchens do so in their article, “Toss the Text? An Investigation of Student and Faculty Perspectives on Textbook Reading.” They found a notable mismatch between faculty claims about the importance of reading and the limited degree of support and accountability that they provide. The authors conclude by suggesting some specific tools and strategies for increasing students’ reading compliance and ability. In “Expectations of Students Participating in Voluntary Peer Academic Coaching,” Dustin K. Grabsch, Ricardo A. Peña, and Krystal J. Parks investigate the demographics and goals of students in a peer academic coaching program. They use their findings, including a high proportion of international and first-generation students, to develop recommendations for the program’s outreach and training. Furthermore, they suggest that peer academic coaching programs at different institutions might conduct similar analysis in order to help them tailor their programs to student needs. Many of our readers will be aware of pushes across the United States to restructure developmental coursework. In “Instructors’ Voices: Experiences with State-Mandated Accelerated Integrated Developmental Reading and Writing Coursework in Texas Community Colleges,” Eric J. Paulson, Amber L. Sarker, Jessica Slentz Reynolds, and Ann Marie Cotman consider how instructors have responded to a new structure imposed in their state. By interviewing community college instructors on their experiences with Integrated Reading and Writing, they arrived at several themes, including the challenges posed by acceleration and opportunities for explicit connections between reading and writing. In “Prompting Readers to Plan Might Negatively Affect Their Comprehension of Multiple Documents,” Christian Tarchi studied the impact of prior beliefs on a reader’s ability to process multiple documents. In a quest to determine the relationship between the acquisition of new information on a controversial topic and prior beliefs, the author conducted a task-oriented study to compare the JOURNAL OF COLLEGE READING AND LEARNING 2021, VOL. 51, NO. 2, 79–80 https://doi.org/10.1080/10790195.2021.1903253