Elizabeth Swanson

This project examined the efficacy of a distributed professional development model featuring STRIVE-a set of literacy practices infused into social studies content-on 4th grade students' content knowledge and literacy outcomes. Many upper elementary students struggle with understanding what they read. Evidence suggests that reading in the social studies benefits students' general reading ability, but many teachers are not provided adequate professional development in how to leverage both lit...

This research team will carry out a replication randomized controlled trial (RCT) to examine the efficacy of Sound Partners, a reading intervention, delivered through cross-age peer tutoring.  The project features moderator analyses to examine how socioeconomic status (SES) is related to intervention effects on student reading outcomes. Early achievement gaps between children of high- and low-resource families have persisted over a long period of time for several reasons including that a) n...

The Principal Investigator (PI) will conduct a program of research to examine reading instruction for elementary school students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and how it relates to their reading growth. The PI will also participate in mentoring and training activities to develop expertise in longitudinal data analysis, school-based research, open science practices, and grant writing and management. Research has identified characteristics of effective instruction for ...

The purpose of this project is to develop an adaptive intervention model (AIM) used by instructional leaders to provide ongoing professional development (PD) to content-area middle school teachers as they implement Tier 1 evidence-based literacy practices. Significant numbers of adolescents do not adequately understand complex texts, impeding their school success, access to postsecondary learning, and job opportunities. The problem is even greater for students with disabilities, as evidenced...

The purpose of this project is to test the effectiveness of a variation of the Promoting Accelerated Reading Comprehension of Text (PACT) intervention. Previous research on PACT (including this WWC-reviewed study) has shown positive effects for specific social studies content knowledge and more generalized social studies reading comprehension among eighth graders. To build on the extant evidence and to address the need to build adolescents' comprehension skills in content courses, including ...

The goals of this project are to (a) improve our knowledge of cognitive processes that underlie reading for understanding to identify malleable processes that may be targets of intervention, and (b) provide knowledge about the role of engagement and motivation in enhancing reading comprehension outcomes, and integrate and apply the findings from these studies to develop and test the efficacy of interventions for students with reading comprehension difficulties in grades 7-12. This work is gr...