Effectiveness
Reading Apprenticeship® was found to have potentially positive effects on comprehension for adolescent learners.
Program Description
Reading Apprenticeship® is an instructional approach that intends to help middle school, high school, and community college students develop skills and knowledge to improve their engagement, fluency, and comprehension of content-area materials and texts. To achieve these goals, Reading Apprenticeship® provides a range of professional development activities for teachers, as well as an academic literacy curricula for students. In both cases, Reading Apprenticeship® calls for the teacher to assume the role of expert reader. In this role, the teacher models and guides students’ text-based problem solving in order to build students’ comprehension strategies. By incorporating student/teacher discussions about the process of reading into content-area classes, Reading Apprenticeship® aims to make the teacher’s and students’ reading processes and knowledge visible to others in the classroom, help students understand and regulate their own reading processes, and help students develop strategies for overcoming obstacles while reading and for improving comprehension of texts from core academic disciplines.
Research
One study of
Reading Apprenticeship® that falls within the scope of the Adolescent Literacy review protocol meets What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The study included more than 2,000 ninth-grade students who attended 17 high schools located in 10 school districts across the United States.
Based on this study, the WWC considers the extent of evidence for Reading Apprenticeship® on adolescent learners to be small for comprehension. No studies that meet WWC evidence standards with or without reservations examined the effectiveness of Reading Apprenticeship® on adolescent learners in the alphabetics, reading fluency, or general literacy achievement domains.
