Douglas Mac Iver

Many students from neighborhoods of concentrated poverty enter high school with underdeveloped reading skills, and skill gaps can create widespread achievement and engagement problems for students in high school, as well as college and career. The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of ALFA (Accelerating Literacy for Adolescents) Lab, a small-group class that supports incoming high school students who are poor readers. The ALFA Lab was developed to enhance 9th grade students' rea...

In this project, researchers developed and tested a set of professional development (PD) modules and related tools intended to improve high school teachers' attitudes and practices in ways that support and motivate students to work hard in their classes. Increased motivation and effort are predicted to lead to fewer course failures. Whether students pass or fail classes, particularly in ninth grade, is a strong predictor of high school graduation. For many students, course failure results fr...