Catherine Snow

Learning to read in the early elementary grades is the foundation on which academic success is built. As a nation, we are failing to provide that foundation to the majority of students-particularly low-income students and students of color-despite a solid research base on teaching reading. Teachers are not being prepared to teach reading effectively, leaving districts to find a solution to address this critical gap in teacher capacity. An ongoing partnership between the District of Columbia ...

This research team will work in collaboration with Boston Public Schools to identify policies, classroom-level factors, and school experiences that are associated with children's school success during pre-k and early elementary school grades. The researchers will collect qualitative and quantitative data to address three issues: 1) how students' cumulative experiences within and across settings affect their development over time; 2) how students' characteristics and skills interact dynamical...

Word Generation is a curricular intervention designed to promote adolescents' knowledge and use of academic vocabulary by providing opportunities for students to read and comprehend brief academic texts on compelling and controversial topics, to discuss those texts, to hear the academic words highlighted in those texts in a variety of settings, and to write brief persuasive essays about the controversial topics focused on. Word Generation materials have been developed for use in 6th, 7th, an...

The purpose of this grant was to explore the contributions of perspective taking, complex reasoning, and academic language skills to reading for understanding for upper elementary and middle school students; to develop, refine, and test the efficacy of two literacy programs that target the development of these skills for a general population of students and for struggling readers; and to develop professional learning opportunities for science teachers that could serve as a model for other conten

At the time of this study, available tools for the assessment of reading comprehension had limited use in profiling students' strengths and weaknesses in the components of reading comprehension. Also, these tools were affected by students' ability to decode the words in texts, were non-informative for teachers in guiding instruction, and were limited in assisting teachers of language minority students. In this project, researchers purposed to develop a diagnostic assessment of reading compre...

The purpose of this project was to develop and test a technology-based instructional approach to improving reading comprehension among diverse struggling fifth-grade readers, including English language learners (ELLs). Over 3 years, the researchers planned to conduct 3 studies that developed and refined a digital reading environment called a universal learning edition (ULE), which has strong, embedded supports for reading strategies and active vocabulary learning. At the end of this project,...