K-12 online literacy and reading instruction: A descriptive content analysis from 2000-2021

Online literacy learning is still a relatively new field, however, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, online learning became the primary mode of instruction for millions of students in public, charter, and private schools. This descriptive content analysis seeks to identify trends within the field of online literacy instruction from 2000 to 2021, contextual occurrences and some of the similarities and differences in the literature intended for academic audiences and the literature intended for practitioners. The articles for this content analysis were gathered from the Education Information Resource Center (ERIC) database and the Teacher Resource Center (TRC) database. 59 articles were identified as pertaining to the sample and were analyzed. Results found that within the 59 articles, those intended for academics outweighed those intended for practitioners and that the highest concentration of articles came from the end of the proposed timespan. Some differences between the articles intended for academics and practitioners were the ways the various articles addressed and were coded for student autonomy, transactional distance, and literacy instructional focus areas. The results of the content analysis revealed that there is lack of theoretical consistency within the research being produced for both academics and practitioners and there is a distinct lack of the transactional distance and systems theories, both of which underpin and are vital to the success of online literacy learning.