Julie Coiro's Page

Hi Dennis,
I have not seen your powersearching course yet, but I would love to explore it a bit! I think the online course on evaluation is very much needed - I presented a session at the International Reading Association last year, and people were begging for more work that examines critical evaluation. I also keep in touch with work that Kim Lawless and Susan Goldman are doing at the University of Illinois - they have some very interesting findings about critical evaluation (or the lack thereof! ;-) among middle school students.

I am very familiar with Mary McNabb's work, although I have never met her before.
Much of the work that I do is similar to her ideas about reading on the Internet - although I've spent the last two years working on developing different assessment measures for online reading comprehension. I used some of those assessments in my dissertation and found that, in a regression model, "new literacy skills" uniquely predicted online reading performance among 120 7th graders over and above standardized reading scores and a measure of prior knowledge. So, it provides a little "reality" for new literacies! I found some interesting qualitative patterns too from some case studies about the different "developmental levels" that students move through as they learn more about how to read on the Internet for learning.

I shared some of this today with library media specialists and classroom teachers at the conference - it seems like people are finally "getting it" and seeing why these things are important.

I'm hoping to write this all of this up soon to build on some earlier work from a more qualitative approach. In the mean time, I'm trying to keep up with all the exciting things happening with different groups around the country and network to build relationships with people outside of the reading community - always good to hear different perspectives!

Great talking with you - I will keep an eye out for your new moodle course!
Take care,
:-) Julie