Technical Assistance to Local Impact Evaluations of Striving Readers Projects

Contractors: Abt Associates, Inc.

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 FY08, 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 an rigorous independent evaluation.

Striving Readers is a discretionary grant program for Title I eligible middle and high schools focused on raising reading achievement among students in grades 6-12. Grantees are required to implement both intensive interventions targeted towards struggling readers and school-wide literacy-across-the-curriculum interventions. 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 local evaluations of both the targeted and school-wide interventions. The evaluations of the targeted interventions must use experimental designs, whereas the evaluations of the school-wide interventions may use experimental or quasi-experimental designs. Eight Striving Readers grants were awarded in 2006.

ED awarded a contract to provide technical assistance to the grantees and their evaluation partners to strengthen their experimental evaluation designs and successfully implement those designs. In addition, the contractor will write two cross-site synthesis reports that will address what can be learned from the eight local evaluations taken as a whole. The cross-site synthesis reports will examine:

• To what extent do intensive, targeted interventions improve reading proficiency among struggling adolescent readers?
• To what extent do school-wide literacy-throughout-the-curriculum interventions improve reading proficiency among secondary students?

Design:

Technical assistance is conducted through monthly phone calls and annual conferences of evaluators. The cross-site synthesis reports will provide a systematic review of the empirical evidence from the eight local evaluations.

Duration: 5 years (August 2006 - July 2011)

Current Status: Technical assistance is ongoing.

Abt's profiles of the local evaluations, Abt's cross-site summary tables, and the local evaluators' reports on implementation in the first year of the individual Striving Readers projects are posted on the Striving Readers Program website: http://www.ed.gov/programs/strivingreaders/index.html.