Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interests¹

The research team for this evaluation consists of a prime contractor, MDRC, Inc., of New York City, NY, and two subcontractors, American Institutes for Research (AIR) of Washington, DC, and Survey Research Management (SRM) Corporation of Boulder, CO. None of these organizations or their key staff has financial interests that could be affected by findings from the evaluation of the two supplemental literacy interventions considered in this report. No one on the eight-member Expert Advisory Panel, convened by the research team once a year to provide advice and guidance, has financial interests that could be affected by findings from the evaluation. One member of the Expert Advisory Panel, Dr. Timothy Shanahan of the University of Illinois at Chicago, participated only in an early (2005) panel meeting on the study design. Subsequent to that meeting, he developed a commercial literacy intervention targeted to striving middle-school readers that might either compete with or be used along with the two programs for high school students chosen and evaluated as part of the current study. Dr. Shanahan had no role in the selection of the study programs or in the analysis of evaluation data.