The struggles faced by freshman writing students often stem from reading. College students are required to read scholarly research articles and use these articles as source material for papers. However, without learning strategies to navigate these difficult articles, students often give up in frustration. Often times these students visit me in the writing center and it is clear that their struggles with the difficult texts result in a self esteem crisis. I realized that if students are able to make their way through the difficult scholarly articles, they are more likely to find success in freshman writing and in college. I have conducted research and utilized my own experiences to develop a lesson that walks students through various critical reading strategies to help them better understand and retain what they read in scholarly research articles.

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