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The Effects of the Content Literacy Continuum on Adolescent Students' Reading Comprehension and Academic AchievementThe Effects of the Content Literacy Continuum on Adolescent Students' Reading Comprehension and Academic Achievement

Regional need and study purpose

Some 70 percent of grade 8 students scored below proficient on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading (Lee, Grigg, and Donahue 2007). Grade 8 students in the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Midwest Region states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin ) fared no better, with 64–72 percent scoring below proficient in reading. High schools face the challenge of providing struggling readers with instruction in reading when they arrive in grade 9 while also providing content instruction in core subjects.

Many high schools address students' lack of literacy skills by placing struggling readers in standalone reading classes. Although such classes can help adolescents develop the necessary skills, students' rate of progress is often too slow to bring them up to levels of proficiency that can support the demands of core subject curricula at the high school level (Corrin et al. 2008).

In contrast to the approach of relying on reading classes to provide struggling readers with needed literacy support, researchers at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning created an approach that augments these reading classes with literacy-related instruction embedded in all core subject courses. The separate instructional practices, routines, and embedded learning strategies that make up the cross-content area aspect of this intervention have undergone considerable testing and refinement over 30 years, suggesting that CLC can be implemented with fidelity and that CLC shows promise for improving the literacy and overall content knowledge of high school students (see Schumaker and Deshler 2003). However, very few of the studies on the routines and learning strategies have used research designs that controlled for other potential causal factors (see Deshler and Schumaker 2006 for summaries), and the entire CLC framework has never been tested using a rigorous evaluation methodology.

This research study attempts to provide that critical test. The study aims to measure the causal impact of CLC on students' achievement across content areas using a cluster randomized trial that randomly assigns eligible high schools within each participating school district to either implement the CLC framework or to continue using their current approach to improve literacy skills. The study attempts to answer two research questions:

This project is also designed to describe changes in teacher instruction, the contexts in which CLC is being implemented, the contrast between the CLC approach and other approaches used in participating districts, and the degree to which schools are implementing the program as recommended by its developers.

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