View CV

Bio

Dennis is a 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. 

Want to learn more about what Dennis has been researching and writing lately? You can find summaries on the Dennis’s recent publications page. You can also learn more about his recent work on reading comprehension for multilingual learners on the Knowledge, Language, and Structured Inquiry (K.L.I.) project page. 

Publications

• 2025 International Literacy Association's Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan Outstanding Dissertation Award , Reading Research Quarterly (2025)
• Barriers to Implementation and Strategies for Improvements in Elementary School Tiered Reading Intervention Processes , Reading & Writing Quarterly (2025)
• Evaluating the Impact of the Knowledge, Language, and Structured Inquiry (K.L.I.) Intervention on Reading Comprehension in Upper Elementary Multilingual English Learners , The Journal of Experimental Education (2025)
• Feasibility of the Knowledge, Language, and Inquiry (K.L.I.) intervention for multilingual English learners , The Journal of Educational Research (2025)
• Not Magic but Manageable: Generative AI and Instructional Decision‐Making in Structured Reading Intervention , The Reading Teacher (2025)
• Toward an equitable implementation of the science of reading: K-5 teachers' sensemaking and support needs , Teaching and Teacher Education (2025)
• Usability of a Reading Intervention for Upper-Elementary English Learners: Building Reading Comprehension Through Knowledge, Language, and Structured Inquiry (K.L.I.) , 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)
• Correction to: What do upper‑elementary and middle school teachers know about the processes of text comprehension? , Reading and Writing (2022)

View all publications