Project CRISS Reading Program and Grade 9 Reading Achievement in Rural High Schools
Intervention description
Essentially a teacher professional development intervention, Project CRISS is designed for high school teachers of all the core subjects, including English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. Teachers learn how to apply general Project CRISS learning strategies to content and curricular materials in these core content areas. For example, the trainer demonstrates learning principles—such as assessing student knowledge of a subject before introducing new material or using outlines or graphic organizers to comprehend long text. During the training sessions teachers work in small groups to decide how they can use these techniques in their specific content areas. It is hypothesized that as teachers increase their use of such research-based strategies, students learn more ways to comprehend text and become more self-directed readers.
The prescribed CRISS training and follow-up assistance allow teachers to learn, practice, combine, and adapt research-based reading comprehension strategies across content areas over a one-year period, followed by an additional year of reinforcement training and follow-up support. A local site facilitator (teacher in the school or district) is selected and trained to serve as the in-school resource. By year 2 of the intervention, teachers are expected to have developed lesson plans that consistently incorporate research-based learning and reading comprehension strategies across all content areas.
Project CRISS is an integration of research-based practices from cognitive science (Brune 1977; Bloom 1950; Simon 1979), reading comprehension research (Palincsar and Brown 1984; Duke and Pearson 2002), social learning research (Vygotsky 1978; Bandura 1977), and instructional strategies to help students understand text (Duffy et al. 1987; Brown et al. 1996; Duke and Pearson 2002). Concepts derived from these areas of research form the foundation of Project CRISS philosophy and operational principles. Strategies in the Project CRISS model reflect the conclusion in Reading Next, from the Alliance for Excellent Education: struggling high school students need to learn the strategies that research indicates are used by proficient readers through explicit classroom instruction (Biancarosa and Snow 2004). Reading Next also concludes that effective instructional principles should be embedded in content, with language arts teachers teaching from content-area texts and other content teachers providing instruction and practice in reading and writing skills in their subject areas.
There is some prior nonexperimental evidence from the developer on the effectiveness of Project CRISS. A study in two Utah school districts compared students in Project CRISS schools with students in demographically similar comparison schools at the elementary grade level (grade 4), middle grade level (grade 7), and the high school level (grades 9–11). Student reading comprehension was measured using a reading recall/comprehension test before and after they were taught either by Project CRISS-trained teachers in treatment schools or by teachers using more traditional "business-as-usual" methods in comparison schools.
Results showed consistent and positive findings across all grades and subjects taught. In the three high school teacher samples of different content areas (biology, social studies, and English language arts teachers) there were statistically significant effects in which the treatment students and comparison students performed roughly similarly on the pretest before the teacher training and in which the treatment students outperformed the comparison students on the posttest after the teacher training (Santa 2004).
The Utah study mirrors other developer research studies using similar methods and achieving similar results in Colorado, Florida, Virginia, and Washington (Santa 1995, 1993). Most of these studies were conducted on primarily White students from middle or lower middle class households.