Ron Novy

Reading and writing are fundamental skills students need to be successful in college, making literacy development an issue of education equity. The literacy skills can be content-specific, indicating faculty members across disciplines need to support student development of appropriate literacy skills. The extent to which faculty members support student literacy development is likely associated with their literacy-focused education equity mindset. The goal of our research was to document the mindset of faculty members across multiple disciplines. We gathered a combination of quantitative and qualitative data from 345 college faculty members using a survey. We found variations in the mindset strength between disciplines, by the number of students taught, gender, and age. Overall the faculty members held a moderate literacy-focused education equity mindset. The findings have implications for student inclusion, retention, and completion.