Technical Assistance to Local Impact Evaluations of Striving Readers Projects

Contractors: Abt Associates, Inc. and Dillon-Goodson Research Associates

Background/Research Questions

Striving Readers is a discretionary grant program focused on raising reading achievement of middle school and high school students through intensive interventions for struggling readers and enhancing the quality of literacy instruction across the curriculum. The program, funded at $35 million in FY09, is a demonstration grant program designed to help build a strong scientific research base around reading strategies that improve adolescent literacy skills and requires each grantee to conduct a rigorous independent evaluation.

Grantees are required to implement intensive interventions targeted towards struggling readers. Because the program aims to build a strong, scientific research base around reading strategies that improve adolescent literacy skills, grantees must use independent researchers to conduct rigorous evaluations of their targeted intervention that use experimental designs. The 2006 grantees were also required to implement school-wide literacy-across-the-curriculum interventions, and to conduct evaluations of the school-wide interventions using experimental or quasi-experimental designs. The first eight Striving Readers grants were awarded in 2006, and an additional eight grants were awarded in 2009.

ED awarded two contracts to provide technical assistance to both cohorts of grantees and their evaluation partners to strengthen their experimental evaluation designs and successfully implement those designs. In addition, each year, the contractor will develop cross-site tables and project profiles that will summarize the key features of the interventions tested, and the designs and findings of the evaluations. The cross-site tables and project profiles will summarize findings on the following research questions:

• To what extent do intensive, targeted interventions improve reading proficiency among struggling adolescent readers?
• To what extent were the intensive, targeted interventions implemented with fidelity?
• To what extent do school-wide literacy-throughout-the-curriculum interventions improve reading proficiency among secondary students? (cohort 1 projects only)
• To what extent were the school-wide literacy-throughout-the-curriculum interventions implemented with fidelity? (cohort 1 projects only)

Design:

Technical assistance is conducted through monthly phone calls and annual conferences of evaluators. The cross-site tables and project profiles will be updated annually.

Cost/Duration: First contract: $1,679,098 over 6 years (August 2006–August 2012)
Second contract: $573,220 over 4 years (January 2010–January 2014)

Current Status:

Technical assistance is ongoing.

The contractor's profiles of the eight local evaluations of the 2006 grants, cross-site summary tables, and the local evaluators' reports on the first three years of the 2006 Striving Readers projects are posted on the Striving Readers Program website: http://www2.ed.gov/programs/strivingreaders/performance.html.