Dennis S. Davis
Bio
Dennis is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education in the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences in the NC State College of Education. His teaching, research, and professional development activities focus on upper-elementary literacy instruction with an emphasis on reading comprehension, assessment, and intervention supports for students when they have difficulties in reading.
In his current work, Dennis is particularly interested in helping educators develop specialized knowledge of reading comprehension to support high-quality instruction. Reading comprehension is more complex than people often realize. It is not a single component of reading, but rather, a combination of multiple components. These components include all the skills required for accurate and automatic word recognition and skills for constructing meaning from spoken language. Reading comprehension is a process of fluently orchestrating these components to build a mental model that coherently integrates the ideas expressed by the author with the knowledge and experiences of the reader. Teaching children to comprehend means teaching them the skills and knowledge needed to coordinate this process. Dennis’s primary goal as a researcher and teacher educator at a land-grant public university is to help educators learn to teach reading comprehension effectively, drawing on the best evidence available.
He is affiliated with the elementary education undergraduate program and the Literacy and English Language Arts (LELA) PhD concentration. He coordinates the M.Ed. concentration in Reading Education. As part of that concentration, he directs the Wolfpack Readers program, which offers direct tutoring services to children, hands-on intervention training for NC State graduate students, and mentorship opportunities for undergraduates. His recent courses focus on assessment practices in elementary classrooms, intervention and diagnostic assessment in reading, and language and cognition in the reading brain.
He is currently working on the Building Reading Comprehension through Knowledge, Language, and Structured Inquiry (K.L.I.) project, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences. In this multi-year project, Dennis and his colleagues are designing and piloting a new small-group reading comprehension intervention for English learners in grades 3-5. He also co-leads the Systems for Uncorrelating Poverty and Reading (SUPR) project. This project, funded by the NC State College of Education Interdisciplinary Research Hubs grant, seeks to understand the features, characteristics, and practices that allow some NC elementary schools to achieve high levels of reading achievement with high-poverty student populations.
Want to learn more about what Dennis has been researching and writing lately? You can find summaries of selected recent publications here.
Education
PhD Learning,Teaching, and Diversity Peabody College at Vanderbilt University 2010
Publications
- Barriers to Implementation and Strategies for Improvements in Elementary School Tiered Reading Intervention Processes , READING & WRITING QUARTERLY (2025)
- Feasibility of the Knowledge, Language, and Inquiry (KLI) intervention for multilingual English learners , JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH (2025)
- Usability of a Reading Intervention for Upper-Elementary English Learners: Building Reading Comprehension Through Knowledge, Language, and Structured Inquiry (KLI) , AERA OPEN (2025)
- Elementary School Teachers' Enactment of a Content Literacy Curriculum in a Virtual Tutoring Program for Multilingual Students , EDUCATION SCIENCES (2024)
- What will it take to help all third graders learn to read? Recommendations for improving policies on early literacy learning , Emerging trends in education policy: Unapologetic progressive conversations (2023)
- What do upper-elementary and middle school teachers know about the processes of text comprehension? , READING AND WRITING (2022)
- What do upper-elementary and middle school teachers know about the processes of text comprehension? (Mar, 10.1007/s11145-022-10268-4, 2022) , READING AND WRITING (2022)
- Getting KnERDI with language: Examining teachers’ knowledge for Enhancing Reading Development in Code-Based and Meaning-Based Domains , Reading Research Quarterly (2021)
- Using Insights from Teachers to Inform Online Professional Development in Early Literacy Instruction , Literacy Research and Instruction (2021)
- Is It Time for a Hard Conversation about Cueing Systems and Word Reading in Teacher Education? , Reading & Writing Quarterly (2020)