Research Reports

Rapid developments in both educational technologies and curriculum philosophies have changed the ways in which students and educators interact with texts. Calling upon the work of such leading literacy scholars as Manzoor Ahmed, Vicki Jacobs, and Terry Salinger, this essay examines America’s stagnant functional literacy rates through the interrogation of a simple question first raised by N. Katherine Hayles in her recent text How We Think: Why should hypertext, and web reading in general, lead to poorer comprehension? Using historical trends and contemporary research findings on how children use a variety of texts, this essay represents a call to re-affirm the importance of dialogical reading practices in the home and the classroom.