Search Results

This new practice guide, developed by the What Works Clearinghouse™ (WWC) in conjunction with an expert panel, distills contemporary early childhood and preschool education research into seven easily comprehensible and practical recommendations that preschool educators can use to prepare young children for school. The seven recommendations in this practice guide will also be useful for administrators along with parents, caregivers, and guardians.

This practice guide provides four evidence-based recommendations that teachers can use to deliver reading interventions to meet the needs of their students.

This practice guide presents three evidence-based recommendations for helping students in grades 6–12 develop effective writing skills. Each recommendation includes specific, actionable guidance for educators on implementing practices in their classrooms. The guide also summarizes and rates the evidence supporting each recommendation, describes examples to use in class, and offers the panel’s advice on how to overcome potential implementation obstacles. This guide is geared towards administrators and teachers in all disciplines who want to help improve their students’ writing.

This practice guide provides four recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Each recommendation includes implementation steps and solutions for common obstacles. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This guide is geared towards teachers, administrators, and other educators who want to improve their students’ foundational reading skills, and is a companion to the practice guide, Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade.

This practice guide provides four recommendations that address what works for English learners during reading and content area instruction. Each recommendation includes extensive examples of activities that can be used to support students as they build the language and literacy skills needed to be successful in school. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This guide is geared toward teachers, administrators, and other educators who want to improve instruction in academic content and literacy for English learners in elementary and middle school.

This practice guide provides four recommendations for improving elementary students’ writing. Each recommendation includes implementation steps and solutions for common roadblocks. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This guide is geared toward teachers, literacy coaches, and other educators who want to improve the writing of their elementary students.

Students who read with understanding at an early age gain access to a broader range of texts, knowledge, and educational opportunities, making early reading comprehension instruction particularly critical. This guide recommends five specific steps that teachers, reading coaches, and principals can take to successfully improve reading comprehension for young readers.

This guide offers five specific recommendations to help educators identify struggling readers and implement evidence-based strategies to promote their reading achievement.

This guide presents strategies that classroom teachers and specialists can use to increase the reading ability of adolescent students.

The target audience for this guide is a broad spectrum of school practitioners such as administrators, curriculum specialists, coaches, staff development specialists and teachers who face the challenge of providing effective literacy instruction for English language learners in the elementary grades.

World of Words is a supplementary curriculum used to help young children develop vocabulary, concept knowledge, and content knowledge in science. The curriculum includes intentional conversations and shared book readings of texts focused on science topics.

Web-Based Intelligent Tutoring for the Structure Strategy (ITSS) is a supplemental web-based program for students in grades K-8. It is intended to develop literacy skills needed to understand factual texts encountered in classrooms and everyday life. The program teaches students how to follow the logical structure of factual text and to use text structure to improve understanding and recall. In particular, ITSS highlights five main text structures that are used to (1) make comparisons; (2) present problems and solutions; (3) link causes and effects; (4) present sequences; and (5) describe things, people, creatures, places, or events. The program helps students classify the structure of a passage by identifying certain key words, such as “solution” and “in contrast,” that clue readers in to the type of arguments the text is making.

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is a nationwide network of free open-enrollment college-preparatory schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. KIPP schools are usually established under state charter school laws and KIPP is America’s largest network of charter schools. KIPP Aims to prepare poor and minority students to succeed in a college preparatory curriculum. It provides training for principals and offers them greater autonomy over budget and hiring decisions. KIPP schools provide about 60% more instructional time than traditional public schools—through a longer school day and additional instructional days on Saturdays and in the summer.

Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) is a short-term, supplementary, small-group literacy intervention designed to help struggling readers achieve grade-level competency. The intervention provides explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, reading comprehension, oral language skills, and writing. LLI helps teachers match students with texts of progressing difficulty and deliver systematic lessons targeted to a student’s reading ability.

Success for All (SFA®) is a whole-school reform model (that is, a model that integrates curriculum, school culture, family, and community supports) for students in prekindergarten through grade 8. SFA® includes a literacy program, quarterly assessments of student learning, a social-emotional development program, computer-assisted tutoring tools, family support teams for students’ parents, a facilitator who works with school personnel, and extensive training for all intervention teachers. The literacy program emphasizes phonics for beginning readers and comprehension for all students. Teachers provide reading instruction to students grouped by reading ability for 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week. In addition, certified teachers or paraprofessionals provide daily tutoring to students who have difficulty reading at the same level as their classmates.

READ 180® is a reading program designed for struggling readers who are reading 2 or more years below grade level. It combines online and direct instruction, student assessment, and teacher professional development. READ 180® is delivered in 90-minute sessions that include whole-group instruction, three small-group rotations, and whole-class wrap-up. Small-group rotations include individualized instruction using an adaptive computer application, small-group instruction, and independent reading. READ 180® is designed for students in elementary through high school.

Teach For America (TFA) is a highly selective route to teacher certification that aims to place non-traditionally trained teachers in high-need public schools. Many TFA teachers hold bachelors’ degrees from selective colleges and universities, in fields outside of education. TFA teachers commit to teach for at least 2 years. TFA teachers receive 5–7 weeks of in-person training over the summer before they begin teaching, then continue to receive professional development and one-on-one coaching from TFA while teaching, in addition to support provided by their schools and districts. As full-time employees of the public schools where they work, TFA teachers receive the same salary and benefits as other first- or second-year teachers in their school or district.

Literacy Express is a preschool curriculum designed for three- to five-year-old children. It is structured around units on oral language, emergent literacy, basic math, science, general knowledge, and socioemotional development. It can be used in half-or full-day programs with typically developing children and children with special needs. It provides professional development opportunities for staff; teaching materials; suggested activities; and recommendations for room arrangement, daily schedules, and classroom management.

Reading Recovery® is an intervention that provides one-on-one tutoring to students in grade 1 with low literacy achievement. This supplemental program aims to improve student reading and writing skills by providing one-on-one tutoring, tailoring the content of each lesson to each student based on observations and analyses of the student strengths and weaknesses from prior lessons. Trained Reading Recovery® teachers deliver tutoring daily in 30-minute one-on-one sessions over the course of 12 to 20 weeks. Reading Recovery® teachers incorporate instruction in topics such as phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, writing, oral language, and motivation depending on student needs.

Reading Apprenticeship® is a professional development program that aims to help teachers improve their students’ literacy skills. The program also aims to improve student social-emotional learning outcomes such as belonging, social awareness, growth mindset, and self-efficacy. Reading Apprenticeship® trains teachers to model reading comprehension strategies and help students practice these strategies in their classrooms.

Dual language programs are long-term instructional programs that provide content and literacy instruction to all students through two languages—English and a partner language—with the goals of promoting academic achievement, bilingualism and biliteracy, and sociocultural competence. Dual language programs can be implemented with students from one language group (in one-way programs) or with students from two language groups (in two-way programs).

A classroom-based, self-regulation intervention consisting of music- and movement-based circle time games designed to systematically increase in cognitive complexity.

Achieve3000® is a supplemental online literacy program that provides nonfiction reading content to students in grades preK–12 and focuses on building phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing skills. Achieve3000® is designed to help students advance their nonfiction reading skills by providing differentiated online instruction. Teachers use the program with an entire class but the assignments are tailored to each student’s reading ability level. For example, teachers assign an article and related activities to an entire class; the program then tailors the version of the article to each student by automatically increasing the difficulty of text when a student is ready for more challenging text. Achieve3000® provides lessons that follow a five-step routine: (1) respond to a Before Reading Poll, (2) read an article, (3) answer activity questions, (4) respond to an After Reading Poll, and (5) answer a Thought Question. Progress reports and student usage data, provided by the online tool, enable teachers to track both whole-class and individual student progress. The program is designed for diverse student groups, including general education students, struggling readers in need of intensive tutoring, and English learners.

Doors to Discovery™ is a preschool literacy curriculum that uses eight thematic units of activities to help children build fundamental early literacy skills in oral language, phonological awareness, concepts of print, alphabet knowledge, writing, and comprehension. The eight thematic units cover topics such as nature, friendship, communities, society, and health. Each unit is available as a kit that includes various teacher resources.

Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition^® (CIRC^®) is a comprehensive reading and writing program for students in grades 2–8. It includes story-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated reading and language arts activities. Pairs of students (grouped either by or across ability levels) read to each other, predict how stories will end, summarize stories, write responses, and practice spelling, decoding, and vocabulary. Within cooperative teams of four, students work to understand the main idea of a story and work through the writing process. The CIRC^® process includes teacher instruction, team practice, peer assessment, and team/partner recognition. A Spanish version of the program was also designed for grades 2–5.

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies is a peer-tutoring program for grades K–6 that aims to improve student proficiency in several disciplines. During the 30-35 minute peer-tutoring sessions, students take turns acting at the tutor, coaching and correcting one another as they work through problems. The designation of tutoring pairs and skill assignment is based on teacher judgement of student needs and abilities, and teachers reassign tutoring pairs regularly.  

Green Dot Public Schools is a nonprofit organization that operates more than 20 public charter middle and high schools in California, Tennessee, and Washington. The Green Dot Public Schools are regulated and monitored by the local school district, but operate outside of the district’s direct control. The Green Dot Public Schools model emphasizes high quality teaching, strong school leadership, a curriculum that prepares students for college, and partnerships with the community. Any student may enroll in a Green Dot Public School if there is space available. Many Green Dot Public Schools operate with unionized teachers and staff. Several of the Green Dot Public Schools were chartered in existing public schools which were performing below district or community expectations. Funding for Green Dot Public Schools operations comes through public federal, state, and local finances, while some transformations of existing district-run schools into charter schools have been funded partly by private foundations.

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) is an intervention designed to improve students’ academic skills through a six-step process that teaches students specific academic strategies and self-regulation skills. The practice is especially appropriate for students with learning disabilities. The intervention begins with teacher direction and ends with students independently applying the strategy, such as planning and organizing ideas before writing an essay. More specifically, the six steps involve the teacher providing background knowledge, discussing the strategy with the student, modeling the strategy, helping the student memorize the strategy, supporting the strategy, and then watching as the student independently performs the strategy. A key part of the process is teaching self-regulation skills, such as goal-setting and self-monitoring, which aim to help students apply the strategy without guidance. The steps can be combined, changed, reordered, or repeated, depending on the needs of the student. The SRSD model can be used with students in grades 2 through 12 in individual, small group, or whole classroom settings.

The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing® (LiPS®) program (formerly called the Auditory Discrimination in Depth® [ADD] program) is designed to teach students the skills they need to decode words and to identify individual sounds and blends in words. LiPS® is designed for emergent readers in kindergarten through grade 3 or for struggling, dyslexic readers. The program is individualized to meet students’ needs and is often used with students who have learning disabilities or difficulties. Initial activities engage students in discovering the lip, tongue, and mouth actions needed to produce specific sounds. After students are able to produce, label, and organize the sounds with their mouths, subsequent activities in sequencing, reading, and spelling use the oral aspects of sounds to identify and order them within words. The program also offers direct instruction in letter patterns, sight words, and context clues in reading.

Head Start is a national, federally-funded program that provides services to promote school readiness for children from birth to age 5 from predominantly low-income families. These services are provided to both children and their families and include education, health and nutrition, family engagement, and other social services. Head Start program administrators are given the flexibility to design service delivery to be responsive to cultural, linguistic, and other contextual needs of local communities, leading to considerable variability in the services offered. Head Start service models also vary according to family needs, such that children and families may be served through center-based or family child care, home visits, or a combination of programs that operate full or half days for 8–12 months per year.

Fast Track is a comprehensive intervention program designed to reduce conduct problems and promote academic, behavioral, and social improvement. Prior to grade 1, students are identified as being at risk for long-term antisocial behavior through teacher and parent reports of conduct problems. Delivery of the program begins in grade 1 and continues through grade 10. After the first year, the frequency of the supports is reduced based on the assessed functioning of the students and their families. Fast Track consists of seven integrated intervention components: the Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) curriculum, parent groups, parent–child sharing time, child social skills training groups, home visiting, child peer-pairing, and academic tutoring.

Open Court Reading© is a reading program for grades K–6 that is designed to teach decoding, comprehension, inquiry, and writing in a three-part progression. Part One of each unit, Preparing to Read, focuses on phonemic awareness, sounds and letters, phonics, fluency, and word knowledge. Part Two, Reading and Responding, emphasizes reading literature for understanding, comprehension, inquiry, and practical reading applications. Part Three, Language Arts, focuses on writing, spelling, grammar, usage, mechanics, and basic computer skills.

Repeated reading is an academic practice that aims to increase oral reading fluency. Repeated reading can be used with students who have developed initial word reading skills but demonstrate inadequate reading fluency for their grade level. During repeated reading, a student sits in a quiet location with a teacher and reads a passage aloud at least three times. Typically, the teacher selects a passage of about 50 to 200 words in length. If the student misreads a word or hesitates for longer than 5 seconds, the teacher reads the word aloud, and the student repeats the word correctly. If the student requests help with a word, the teacher reads the word aloud or provides the definition. The student rereads the passage until he or she achieves a satisfactory fluency level.

Spelling Mastery is designed to explicitly teach spelling skills to students in grades 1–6. One of several Direct Instruction curricula from McGraw-Hill that precisely specify how to teach incremental content, Spelling Mastery includes phonemic, morphemic, and whole-word strategies.

Read Naturally is an elementary and middle school supplemental reading program designed to improve reading fluency using a combination of books, audiotapes, and computer software. The program has three main strategies: repeated reading of text for developing oral reading fluency, teacher modeling of story reading, and systematic monitoring of student progress by teachers and the students themselves. Students work at a reading level appropriate for their achievement level, progress through the program at their own rate, and, for the most part, work on an independent basis. Read Naturally® can be used in a variety of settings, including classrooms, resource rooms, or computer or reading labs. Although the program was not originally developed for English language learners, additional materials for these students are currently available.

Reading Recovery® is an intervention that provides one-on-one tutoring to students in grade 1 with low literacy achievement. This supplemental program aims to improve student reading and writing skills by providing one-on-one tutoring, tailoring the content of each lesson to each student based on observations and analyses of the student strengths and weaknesses from prior lessons. Trained Reading Recovery® teachers deliver tutoring daily in 30-minute one-on-one sessions over the course of 12 to 20 weeks. Reading Recovery® teachers incorporate instruction in topics such as phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, writing, oral language, and motivation depending on student needs.

Bright Beginnings is an early childhood curriculum, based in part on High/Scope and Creative Curriculum, with an additional emphasis on literacy skills. The curriculum consists of nine thematic units designed to enhance children’s cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development. Each unit includes concept maps, literacy lessons, early childhood center activities, and home activities. Special emphasis is placed on the development of early language and literacy skills. Parent involvement is a key component of the program.

SpellRead™ (formerly known as SpellRead Phonological Auditory Training®) is a literacy program for struggling readers in grade 2 or above, including special education students, English language learners, and students more than 2 years below grade level in reading. SpellRead integrates the auditory and visual aspects of the reading process and emphasizes specific skill mastery through systematic and explicit instruction. Students are taught to recognize and manipulate English sounds; to practice, apply, and transfer their skills using texts at their reading level; and to write about their reading.

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies is a peer-tutoring program for grades K–6 that aims to improve student proficiency in several disciplines. During the 30-35 minute peer-tutoring sessions, students take turns acting at the tutor, coaching and correcting one another as they work through problems. The designation of tutoring pairs and skill assignment is based on teacher judgement of student needs and abilities, and teachers reassign tutoring pairs regularly.  

Phonological Awareness Training is a general practice aimed at enhancing young children’s phonological awareness abilities. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to detect or manipulate the sounds in words independent of meaning and is considered a precursor to reading. Phonological Awareness Training can involve various training activities that focus on teaching children to identify, detect, delete, segment, or blend segments of spoken words (i.e., words, syllables, onsets and rimes, phonemes) or that focus on teaching children to detect, identify, or produce rhyme or alliteration.

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies is a peer-tutoring program for grades K–6 that aims to improve student proficiency in several disciplines. During the 30-35 minute peer-tutoring sessions, students take turns acting at the tutor, coaching and correcting one another as they work through problems. The designation of tutoring pairs and skill assignment is based on teacher judgement of student needs and abilities, and teachers reassign tutoring pairs regularly.  

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies is a peer-tutoring program for grades K–6 that aims to improve student proficiency in several disciplines. During the 30-35 minute peer-tutoring sessions, students take turns acting at the tutor, coaching and correcting one another as they work through problems. The designation of tutoring pairs and skill assignment is based on teacher judgement of student needs and abilities, and teachers reassign tutoring pairs regularly.  

Sound Partners is a phonics-based tutoring program that provides supplemental reading instruction to elementary school students grades K–3 with below-average reading skills. The program is designed for use by tutors with minimal training and experience. Instruction emphasizes letter–sound correspondences, phoneme blending, decoding and encoding phonetically regular words, and reading irregular high-frequency words. It includes oral reading to practice applying phonics skills in text. The program consists of a set of scripted lessons in alphabetic and phonics skills and uses Bob Books beginning reading series as one of the primary texts for oral reading practice. The tutoring can be provided as a pull-out or after-school program or by parents who homeschool their children.

Reading Plus® is a web-based reading intervention that uses technology to provide individualized scaffolded silent reading practice for students in grades 3 and higher. Reading Plus® aims to develop and improve students’ silent reading fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Reading Plus® is designed to adjust the difficulty of the content and duration of reading activities so that students proceed at a pace that corresponds to their reading skill level. The intervention includes differentiated reading activities, computer-based reading assessments, tools to monitor student progress, ongoing implementation support, and supplemental offline activities.

Fast ForWord® is a computer-based reading program intended to help students develop and strengthen the cognitive skills necessary for successful reading and learning. The program, which is designed to be used 30 to 100 minutes a day, five days a week, for 4 to 16 weeks, includes two components.

The Lovaas Model of Applied Behavior Analysis is a type of behavioral therapy that initially focuses on discrete trials: brief periods of one-on-one instruction, during which a teacher cues a behavior, prompts the appropriate response, and provides reinforcement to the child. Children in the program receive an average of 35–40 hours of intervention per week that consists of in-home one-to-one instruction, facilitated peer play, inclusion and support in regular education classrooms, and generalization activities for transfer of skills to natural environments. In addition, parents are trained in instructional techniques. The intervention generally lasts about 3 years.

Accelerated Reader™ is a computerized supplementary reading program that provides guided reading instruction to students in grades K–12. It aims to improve students’ reading skills through reading practice and by providing frequent feedback on students’ progress to teachers. The Accelerated Reader™ program requires students to select and read a book based on their area of interest and reading level. Upon completion of a book, students take a computerized quiz based on the book’s content and vocabulary. Quiz performance allows teachers to monitor student progress and to identify students who may need additional reading assistance.

Reading Mastery is designed to provide systematic reading instruction to students in grades K–6. Reading Mastery can be used as an intervention program for struggling readers, as a supplement to a school’s core reading program, or as a stand-alone reading program, and is available in three versions. During the implementation of Reading Mastery, students are grouped with other students at a similar reading level, based on program placement tests. The program includes a continuous monitoring component.

Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition^® (CIRC^®) is a comprehensive reading and writing program for students in grades 2–8. It includes story-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated reading and language arts activities. Pairs of students (grouped either by or across ability levels) read to each other, predict how stories will end, summarize stories, write responses, and practice spelling, decoding, and vocabulary. Within cooperative teams of four, students work to understand the main idea of a story and work through the writing process. The CIRC^® process includes teacher instruction, team practice, peer assessment, and team/partner recognition. A Spanish version of the program was also designed for grades 2–5.

Read Naturally is an elementary and middle school supplemental reading program designed to improve reading fluency using a combination of books, audiotapes, and computer software. The program has three main strategies: repeated reading of text for developing oral reading fluency, teacher modeling of story reading, and systematic monitoring of student progress by teachers and the students themselves. Students work at a reading level appropriate for their achievement level, progress through the program at their own rate, and, for the most part, work on an independent basis. Read Naturally® can be used in a variety of settings, including classrooms, resource rooms, or computer or reading labs. Although the program was not originally developed for English language learners, additional materials for these students are currently available.

Reading Apprenticeship® is a professional development program that aims to help teachers improve their students’ literacy skills. The program also aims to improve student social-emotional learning outcomes such as belonging, social awareness, growth mindset, and self-efficacy. Reading Apprenticeship® trains teachers to model reading comprehension strategies and help students practice these strategies in their classrooms.

Project CRISS® (CReating Independence through Student-owned Strategies) is a professional development program for teachers that aims to improve reading, writing, and learning for students in grades 3–12. The implementation of Project CRISS® does not require a change in the curriculum or materials being used in the classroom, but instead calls for a change in teaching style to focus on three primary concepts derived from cognitive psychology and brain research. These three concepts include students (1) monitoring their learning to assess when they have understood content, (2) integrating new information with prior knowledge, and (3) being actively involved in the learning process through discussing, writing, organizing information, and analyzing the structure of text to help improve comprehension.

Read Well® is a reading curriculum to increase the literacy abilities of students in kindergarten and grade 1. The program provides instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. Students are given opportunities to discuss the vocabulary concepts that are presented in each story. The program is based on the tenets of scaffolded instruction, where teachers begin by presenting models, and gradually decrease their support by providing guided practice, before students are asked to complete the skill or strategy independently. For example, the student and teacher read new text aloud, with the teacher reading the difficult or irregular words. As student skills (and motivation) increase, the amount of teacher-read text decreases, and the student is given greater independence. The program combines daily whole class activities with small group lessons.

Dialogic Reading is an interactive shared picture book reading practice designed to enhance young children’s language and literacy skills. During the shared reading practice, the adult and the child switch roles so that the child learns to become the storyteller with the assistance of the adult, who functions as an active listener and questioner.

The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing® (LiPS®) program (formerly called the Auditory Discrimination in Depth® [ADD] program) is designed to teach students the skills they need to decode words and to identify individual sounds and blends in words. LiPS® is designed for emergent readers in kindergarten through grade 3 or for struggling, dyslexic readers. The program is individualized to meet students’ needs and is often used with students who have learning disabilities or difficulties. Initial activities engage students in discovering the lip, tongue, and mouth actions needed to produce specific sounds. After students are able to produce, label, and organize the sounds with their mouths, subsequent activities in sequencing, reading, and spelling use the oral aspects of sounds to identify and order them within words. The program also offers direct instruction in letter patterns, sight words, and context clues in reading.

Headsprout Early Reading is an online supplemental early literacy curriculum consisting of eighty 20-minute animated episodes. The episodes are designed to teach phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The program adapts to a child’s responses, providing additional instruction and review if a child does not choose the correct answer. Teachers may use stories based on the episodes to reinforce instruction provided in the lessons.

Lexia Reading is a computerized reading program that provides phonics instruction and gives students independent practice in basic reading skills. Lexia Reading is designed to supplement regular classroom instruction and to support skill development in the five areas of reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel.

Earobics® is an interactive software that provides students in prekindergarten through grade 3 with individual, systematic instruction in early literacy skills as students interact with animated characters. Earobics® Foundations is the version for prekindergaten, kindergarten, and grade 1. Earobics® Connections is for grades 2 and 3 and older struggling readers. The program builds students’ skills in phonemic awareness, auditory processing, and phonics, as well as the cognitive and language skills required for comprehension. Each level of instruction addresses recognizing and blending sounds, rhyming, and discriminating phonemes within words, adjusting to each student’s ability level. The software is supported by music, audiocassettes, and videotapes, and includes picture/word cards, letter–sound decks, big books, little books, and leveled readers for reading independently or in groups.

Curiosity Corner is a comprehensive early childhood curriculum designed to help children at risk of school failure because of poverty. The program offers children experiences that develop the attitudes, skills, and knowledge necessary for later school success, with a special emphasis on children’s language and literacy skills. Curiosity Corner has two sets of 38 weekly thematic units, one set for 3-year-olds and one set for 4-year-olds. Each day, the program staff present children with learning experiences through sequential daily activities. The program provides training, support, and teaching materials for teaching staff and administrators. Parents are encouraged to participate in children’s learning through activities in and out of the classroom.

Early Intervention in Reading (EIR)® is a program designed to provide extra instruction to groups of students at risk of failing to learn to read. The program uses picture books to stress instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, and contextual analysis, along with repeated reading and writing. In grades K–2, the program includes whole-class instruction followed by small-group instruction for students who score low on oral reading and literacy skills. In grades 3 and 4, the program consists of small group instruction for 20 minutes, 4 days a week. Teachers are trained for 9 months using workshops and an Internet-based professional development program.

Ready, Set, Leap!® is a comprehensive preschool curriculum that focuses on early reading skills, such as phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and letter-sound correspondence using multi-sensory technology that incorporates touch, sight, and sound. Teachers may adopt either a theme-based or a literature-based teaching approach. For each approach, the curriculum provides lesson plans, learning objectives, and assessment tools.

The Voyager Universal Literacy System® is a core reading program designed to help students learn to read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. This program uses strategies such as individual reading instruction, higher-level comprehension activities, problem solving, and writing. Students are also exposed to computer-based practice and reinforcement in phonological skills, comprehension, fluency, language development, and writing. The program uses whole classroom, small group, and independent group settings. Voyager Universal Literacy System® emphasizes regular assessments, with biweekly reviews for struggling students and quarterly assessments for all students.

Ladders to Literacy is a supplemental early literacy curriculum published in Ladders to Literacy: A Kindergarten Activity Book. The program targets children at different levels and from diverse cultural backgrounds. The activities are organized into three sections with about 20 activities each: print awareness, phonological awareness skills, and oral language skills.

Waterford Early Reading Program™ is a software-based curriculum for students in kindergarten through grade 2. The curriculum is designed to promote reading, writing, and typing, incorporating literacy skills such as letter mastery, language stories, spelling, basic writing skills, reading and listening development, and comprehension strategies. It can be used as a supplement to the regular reading curriculum. Program materials include classroom lessons and take-home materials in addition to the Waterford software. Waterford Early Reading Program™ offers pretest placement and posttest assessments, in addition to ongoing assessments throughout the program.

Waterford Early Reading Level One™ is an emergent literacy curriculum that uses computer-based technology to prepare children for reading. It begins with a tutorial to familiarize the child with the computer and mouse and a reading placement evaluation to assess and determine whether a child should work on Level One objectives: capital letters, lowercase letters, or beginning decoding skills. The computerized instruction is supplemented by activities for phonological and phonemic awareness, letter recognition, knowledge of story and print concepts, and general readiness skills.

ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) is a peer-assisted instructional strategy designed to be integrated with most existing reading curricula. This approach provides students with increased opportunities to practice reading skills by asking questions and receiving immediate feedback from a peer tutor. Pairs of students take turns tutoring each other to reinforce concepts and skills initially taught by the teacher. The teacher creates age-appropriate peer teaching materials for the peer tutors; these materials take into account tutees’ language skills and disabilities.

SpellRead™ (formerly known as SpellRead Phonological Auditory Training®) is a literacy program for struggling readers in grade 2 or above, including special education students, English language learners, and students more than 2 years below grade level in reading. SpellRead integrates the auditory and visual aspects of the reading process and emphasizes specific skill mastery through systematic and explicit instruction. Students are taught to recognize and manipulate English sounds; to practice, apply, and transfer their skills using texts at their reading level; and to write about their reading.

Corrective Reading is designed to promote reading accuracy (decoding), fluency, and comprehension skills of students in grade 3 or higher who are reading below their grade level. The program has four levels that correspond to students’ decoding skills. All lessons in the program are sequenced and scripted. Corrective Reading can be implemented in small groups of 4–5 students or in a whole-class format. Corrective Reading is intended to be taught in 45-minute lessons 4–5 times a week.

Failure Free Reading is a language development program designed to improve vocabulary, fluency, word recognition, and reading comprehension for students in kindergarten through grade 12 who score in the bottom 15% on standardized tests and who have not responded to conventional beginning reading instruction. The three key dimensions of the program are: 1) repeated exposure to text, 2) predictable sentence structures, and 3) story concepts that require minimal prior knowledge. The program combines systematic, scripted teacher instruction; talking software; workbook exercises; and independent reading activities.

The Wilson Reading System® is a reading and writing program. It provides a curriculum for teaching reading and spelling to individuals of any age who have difficulty with written language. The Wilson Reading System® directly teaches the structure of words in the English language, aiming to help students learn the coding system for reading and spelling. The program provides interactive lesson plans and uses a sequential system with extensive controlled text. The Wilson Reading System® is structured to progress from phoneme segmentation to more challenging tasks, and seeks to improve sight word knowledge, fluency, vocabulary, oral expressive language development, and reading comprehension.

Fluency Formula™ is a supplemental curriculum designed to promote reading fluency in grades 1–6. The program emphasizes automatic recognition of words, decoding accuracy, and oral expressiveness as the foundations for building reading fluency. A daily 10- to 15-minute lesson is delivered in the classroom. Students participate in whole-class, small-group, and individual practice activities using workbooks, read-aloud anthologies, library books, fluency activity cards, and audio CDs. The curriculum encourages at-home practice and includes a Fluency Formula™ Assessment System, which allows teachers to assess student fluency using 1-minute grade-level passages and a timer.

Start Making a Reader Today® (SMART®) is a volunteer tutoring program for students in grades K–2 who are at risk of reading failure. The program is designed to be a low-cost, easy-to-implement intervention. Volunteer tutors go into schools where at least 40% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and read one-on-one with students twice a week for 30 minutes. Typically, one volunteer works with two students on four types of activities: reading to the student, reading with the student, re-reading with the student, and asking the student questions about what has been read. The program also gives each student two new books a month to encourage families to read together.

Stepping Stones to Literacy (SSL) is a supplemental curriculum designed to promote listening, print conventions, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and serial processing/rapid naming (quickly naming familiar visual symbols and stimuli, such as letters or colors). The program targets older preschool and kindergarten students who are considered to be underachieving readers, based on teacher’s recommendations, assessments, and systematic screening. Students participate in 10- to 20-minute daily lessons in a small group or individually. The curriculum consists of 25 lessons, for a total of 9–15 hours of instructional time.

Read, Write & Type!™ Learning System is a software program with supporting materials designed to teach beginning reading skills by emphasizing writing as a way to learn to read. The program was developed for students ages 6–9 years who are just beginning to read, and for students who are struggling readers and writers. The main goal of Read, Write & Type!™ is to help students develop an awareness of the 40 English phonemes and the ability to associate each phoneme with a letter or a combination of letters and a finger stroke on the keyboard. Other goals of the program include identifying phonemes in words; and fluency in sounding out, typing, and reading regularly spelled words.

The Little Books are a set of books designed for interactive book reading between parents and children or between teachers and students. The books use thematic topics familiar to children. They are written with high-frequency words and use simple phrases and sentences. The books also have strong links between illustrations and text.

Dialogic Reading is an interactive shared picture book reading practice designed to enhance young children’s language and literacy skills. During the shared reading practice, the adult and the child switch roles so that the child learns to become the storyteller with the assistance of the adult, who functions as an active listener and questioner.

The Bilingual Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (BCIRC) program, an adaptation of the Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC) program, was designed to help Spanish-speaking students succeed in reading Spanish and then making a successful transition to English reading. In the adaptation, students complete tasks that focus on reading, writing, and language activities in Spanish and English, while working in small cooperative learning groups. The intervention focuses on students in grades 2–5.

Phonological Awareness Training is a general practice aimed at enhancing young children’s phonological awareness abilities. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to detect or manipulate the sounds in words independent of meaning and is considered a precursor to reading. Phonological Awareness Training can involve various training activities that focus on teaching children to identify, detect, delete, segment, or blend segments of spoken words (i.e., words, syllables, onsets and rimes, phonemes) or that focus on teaching children to detect, identify, or produce rhyme or alliteration.

Phonological Awareness Training plus Letter Knowledge Training is a general practice aimed at enhancing young children’s phonological awareness, print awareness, and early reading abilities. Phonological awareness, the ability to detect or manipulate the sounds in words independent of meaning, is considered to be a precursor to reading. Phonological awareness training (without letter knowledge training) can involve various training activities that focus on teaching children to identify, detect, delete, segment, or blend segments of spoken words (i.e., words, syllables, onsets and rimes, phonemes) or that focus on teaching children to detect, identify, or produce rhyme or alliteration. The added letter knowledge training component includes teaching children the letters of the alphabet and making an explicit link between letters and sounds.

The Vocabulary Improvement Program for English Language Learners and Their Classmates (VIP) is a vocabulary development curriculum for English language learners and native English speakers in grades 4–6. The 15-week program includes 30–45 minute whole class and small group activities that aim to increase students’ understanding of target vocabulary words included in a weekly reading assignment.

The goal of Instructional Conversations is to help English learners develop reading comprehension ability along with English language proficiency. Acting as facilitators, teachers engage students in discussions about stories, key concepts, and related personal experiences, allowing students to appreciate and build on each others’ experiences, knowledge, and understanding. Literature Logs require students to respond in writing to prompts or questions related to sections of stories. These responses are then shared in small groups or with a partner.

Enhanced Proactive Reading, a comprehensive, integrated reading, language arts, and English language development curriculum, is targeted to first-grade English learners experiencing problems with learning to read through conventional instruction. The curriculum is implemented as small group daily reading instruction, during which instructors provide opportunities for participation from all students and give feedback on student responses.

Reading Mastery is designed to provide systematic reading instruction to students in grades K–6. Reading Mastery can be used as an intervention program for struggling readers, as a supplement to a school’s core reading program, or as a stand-alone reading program, and is available in three versions. During the implementation of Reading Mastery, students are grouped with other students at a similar reading level, based on program placement tests. The program includes a continuous monitoring component.

Fast ForWord® is a computer-based reading program intended to help students develop and strengthen the cognitive skills necessary for successful reading and learning. The program, which is designed to be used 30 to 100 minutes a day, five days a week, for 4 to 16 weeks, includes two components.

DaisyQuest is a software bundle that offers computer-assisted instruction in phonological awareness, targeting children 3–7 years old (or preschool to grade 2). The instructional activities, framed in a fairy tale involving a search for a friendly dragon named Daisy, teach children how to recognize words that rhyme; words that have the same beginning, middle, and ending sounds; and words that can be formed from a series of phonemes presented separately. Activities also teach children how to count the number of sounds in words.

DaisyQuest is a software bundle that offers computer-assisted instruction in phonological awareness, targeting children 3–7 years old (or preschool to grade 2). The instructional activities, framed in a fairy tale involving a search for a friendly dragon named Daisy, teach children how to recognize words that rhyme; words that have the same beginning, middle, and ending sounds; and words that can be formed from a series of phonemes presented separately. Activities also teach children how to count the number of sounds in words.

Xtreme Reading is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to improve the literacy skills of struggling students in grades 6 to 12. The curriculum is primarily designed to help students improve their vocabulary, decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension skills. To ensure a productive learning environment, students initially learn social skills associated with creating a supportive learning community, including how to participate in certain class activities (for example, whole-group discussion, small-group work, partner work, transitions). They also participate in a motivational program whereby they discuss their hopes and dreams for the future and set personal goals related to reading and other life areas. The Xtreme Reading program includes teacher-led whole-group instruction, cooperative group work, paired practice, and independent practice.

The Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies (PATHS®) program is a curriculum that aims to promote emotional and social competencies and to reduce aggression and behavior problems in elementary school children. PATHS® is delivered through short lessons given two to three times a week over the school year. The program is based on the principle that understanding and regulating emotions are central to effective problem solving. The lessons focus on (1) self-control, (2) emotional literacy, (3) social competence, (4) positive peer relations, and (5) interpersonal problem-solving skills. There is a separate curriculum for each grade.

Word Generation is a supplemental program that aims to improve students’ reading comprehension by building students’ vocabulary, academic language, and perspective-taking skills through classroom discussion and debate. Word Generation was developed for all students; however, English learners in particular could benefit from its focus on academic language. Word Generation consists of a series of interdisciplinary units with daily lessons focused on a high-interest issue to increase student engagement. Each unit targets a small number of academic vocabulary words that are integrated into texts, activities, writing tasks, debates, and discussions across content areas. Several Word Generation programs exist. In the Word Generation Weekly (WordGen Weekly) and Word Generation Elementary (WordGen Elementary) programs, units are intended to be used across English language arts, math, science, and social studies in grades 6–8 and grades 4 and 5, respectively. In the Science Generation (SciGen) and Social Studies Generation (SoGen) programs, units can supplement or be used in place of regular science and social studies curriculum units in grades 6–8. The different Word Generation programs can be implemented separately or together.

Passport Reading Journeys is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to help improve reading comprehension, vocabulary, word study, and writing skills of struggling readers in grades 6–12. Lessons incorporate both teacher-led instruction and technology, including whole-class and small-group instruction, independent reading, video segments, and independent computer-based practice. The curriculum includes a series of two-week, ten-lesson instructional sequences on topics in science, math, fine art, literature, and social studies. Each sequence is themed as an expedition or journey for students.

Achieve3000® is a supplemental online literacy program that provides nonfiction reading content to students in grades preK–12 and focuses on building phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing skills. Achieve3000® is designed to help students advance their nonfiction reading skills by providing differentiated online instruction. Teachers use the program with an entire class but the assignments are tailored to each student’s reading ability level. For example, teachers assign an article and related activities to an entire class; the program then tailors the version of the article to each student by automatically increasing the difficulty of text when a student is ready for more challenging text. Achieve3000® provides lessons that follow a five-step routine: (1) respond to a Before Reading Poll, (2) read an article, (3) answer activity questions, (4) respond to an After Reading Poll, and (5) answer a Thought Question. Progress reports and student usage data, provided by the online tool, enable teachers to track both whole-class and individual student progress. The program is designed for diverse student groups, including general education students, struggling readers in need of intensive tutoring, and English learners.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) establishes standards for accomplished teachers and awards professional certification to teachers who can demonstrate that their teaching practices meet those standards. Educators and experts in child development and related fields established the organization, and these experts work to develop and refine the standards for accomplished teaching based on the knowledge and skills that effective teachers demonstrate. The standards reflect five core propositions: (1) effective teachers are committed to students and their learning, (2) effective teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach those subjects to students, (3) effective teachers manage and monitor student learning, (4) effective teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience, and (5) effective teachers are members of learning communities. Those seeking certification from the NBPTS must complete a computer-based assessment and three portfolio entries. The certification process can take 1 to 5 years.

System of Least Prompts (SLP) is a practice that involves defining and implementing a hierarchy of prompts to assist students in learning a skill. A prompt is an action by the teacher or other practitioner—such as a verbal instruction to complete a task—that helps a student respond correctly during a learning activity. To use the procedure, the teacher or other practitioner systematically delivers the prompts to students in order, starting with the prompt that provides the least amount of assistance, and providing additional prompts with increasing levels of assistance until the student can correctly perform the task independently. For example, if a student does not independently complete a task following the initial instruction, a teacher may help the student by providing the least-intrusive prompt, such as restating the instruction. If the response still does not occur, the teacher may present the next most intrusive prompt, such as rephrasing the instruction. The teacher continues with more intrusive prompts, such as modeling how to do the task, until the desired response occurs reliably or all the prompts in the sequence have been used. The last prompt, often called the controlling prompt, should result in the student responding correctly. SLP is also known as “least-to-most prompting” or “least intrusive prompts.” SLP does not have a single developer that provides guidance or materials.

Prentice Hall/Pearson Literature© (2007–15) is an English language arts curriculum designed for students in grades 6–12 that focuses on building reading, vocabulary, literary analysis, and writing skills. It uses passages from fiction and nonfiction texts, poetry, and contemporary digital media. The curriculum is based on a textbook. The publisher also provides online components and other materials that enable teachers to provide personalized assignments, monitor students’ progress, and score writing assignments, enrich instruction, or provide additional practice to supplement the textbook.

Prentice Hall Literature© (1989–2005) is an English language arts curriculum designed for students in grades 6–12 that focuses on building reading, writing, listening, viewing, speaking, and language skills. Multiple editions of this curriculum were released between 1989 and 2005, including Prentice Hall Literature© (1989) and Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes© (2000, 2002, 2005). The WWC refers to each of these editions as Prentice Hall Literature© (1989–2005) in this intervention report. Prentice Hall Literature© (1989–2005) is based on a textbook with passages from fiction and nonfiction texts. Every reading selection in the curriculum’s textbook includes pre-reading, active reading, and post-reading activities. The curriculum is organized by themes (such as cultural diversity or American individualism), and units focus on a specific genre (such as poetry, prose, or drama). Throughout each lesson, the curriculum describes related teaching techniques, including direct explanation, modeling, guided practice, feedback, and application. Additional materials are available to supplement the textbook, and are designed to enrich instruction or provide additional practice. Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes© (2000, 2002, 2005) used the same instructional format as the original edition, and introduced new texts as well as new supplementary materials that teachers can use to differentiate instruction.

Pivotal response training (PRT) is an intervention designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. This practice focuses on pivotal (core) areas affected by autism, such as communication and responding to environmental stimuli. PRT sessions typically begin with a parent or teacher providing clear instructions to a child, having the child help choose a stimulus (such as a toy), and focusing the child’s attention. The parent or teacher then encourages the desired behavior (for example, asking for the toy or choosing “toy” from a list of words) by providing rewards if the child implements or attempts to implement the desired behavior. Parents and teachers often model the appropriate behavior or use the stimulus with the child. Activities that maintain existing behaviors are interspersed with activities eliciting new behaviors. The complexity of the required responses increases as training progresses. Parents, teachers, and peers collaboratively implement the practice at school, at home, and in the community. PRT can be used with autistic children aged 2–18. PRT is also known as Pivotal Response Therapy, Pivotal Response Treatment®, or Natural Language Paradigm.

Accelerated Reader™ is a computerized supplementary reading program that provides guided reading instruction to students in grades K–12. It aims to improve students’ reading skills through reading practice and by providing frequent feedback on students’ progress to teachers. The Accelerated Reader™ program requires students to select and read a book based on their area of interest and reading level. Upon completion of a book, students take a computerized quiz based on the book’s content and vocabulary. Quiz performance allows teachers to monitor student progress and to identify students who may need additional reading assistance.

The SuccessMaker program is a set of computer-based courses used to supplement regular classroom reading instruction in grades K–8. Using adaptive lessons tailored to a student’s reading level, SuccessMaker aims to improve understanding in areas such as phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and concepts of print.

TAP™ (formerly known as the Teacher Advancement Program) is a comprehensive educator effectiveness program that aims to improve student achievement through supports and incentives that attract, retain, develop, and motivate effective teachers. The program provides teachers with leadership opportunities and associated salary increases; ongoing, school-based professional development; rigorous evaluations; and annual performance bonuses based on a combination of teacher value added to student achievement and observations of their classroom teaching.

Shared Book Reading encompasses practices that adults can use when reading with young children to enhance language and literacy skills. During shared book reading, an adult reads a book to an individual child or to a group of children and uses one or more planned or structured interactive techniques to actively engage the children in the text. The adult may direct the children’s attention to illustrations, print, or word meanings. The adult may engage children in discussions focused on understanding the meaning or sequence of events in a story or on understanding an expository passage. Adults may ask children questions, give explanations, and draw connections between events in the text and those in the children’s own lives as a way of expanding on the text and scaffolding children’s learning experiences to support language development, emergent reading, and comprehension. Importantly, the adult engages in one or more interactive techniques to draw attention to aspects of the text being read.

A reading program for instruction in grades K–6. It uses Big Books (authentic literature), anthologies, Read Alouds, and audio compact discs to provide step-by-step instruction in reading. According to the developer’s website, Houghton Mifflin Reading© was developed based on the findings of the National Reading Panel. The product is designed to be used as a full-year curriculum program with instruction on developing oral language and comprehension, phonemic awareness, decoding skills (phonics, analogy, context, and word recognition), fluency, reading comprehension, writing, spelling, and grammar. Instruction is organized by a set of themes (10 for grades K–1 and 6 for grades 2–6) with selected Big Books (fiction and non-fiction literature) and other classroom activities to highlight the theme.

Academy of READING® is an online program, originally developed by AutoSkill International, that aims to improve students’ reading skills using a structured and sequential approach to learning. The program breaks the task of reading into manageable pieces and provides multiple opportunities for practice in five core areas—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The Carbo Reading Styles Program® is a literacy intervention for students in grades K–12 that aims to meet the individual needs of learners through assessment and tailoring of the instruction to students’ particular reading learning styles. 

Reading Mastery is designed to provide systematic reading instruction to students in grades K–6. Reading Mastery can be used as an intervention program for struggling readers, as a supplement to a school’s core reading program, or as a stand-alone reading program, and is available in three versions. During the implementation of Reading Mastery, students are grouped with other students at a similar reading level, based on program placement tests. The program includes a continuous monitoring component.

Reciprocal teaching is an interactive instructional practice that aims to improve students’ reading comprehension by teaching strategies to obtain meaning from a text. The teacher and students take turns leading a dialogue regarding segments of the text. Students discuss with their teacher how to apply four comprehension strategies—generating questions, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting—to passages of text. During the early stages of reciprocal teaching, the teacher assumes primary responsibility for modeling how to use these strategies. As students become more familiar with the strategies, there is a gradual shift toward student responsibility for talking through the application of the strategies to the text.

Let’s Begin with the Letter People® is an early education curriculum that uses thematic units to develop children’s language and literacy skills. A major focus is phonological awareness, including rhyming, word play, alliteration, and segmentation. Children are encouraged to learn in individual, small group, and whole-class settings. Both cognitive and socio-emotional development are presented as keys to learning.

An early childhood curriculum that focuses on project-based investigations as a means for children to apply skills. It addresses four areas of development: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language.

Ladders to Literacy is a supplemental early literacy curriculum published in Ladders to Literacy: A Kindergarten Activity Book. The program targets children at different levels and from diverse cultural backgrounds. The activities are organized into three sections with about 20 activities each: print awareness, phonological awareness skills, and oral language skills.

Fast ForWord® is a computer-based reading program intended to help students develop and strengthen the cognitive skills necessary for successful reading and learning. The program, which is designed to be used 30 to 100 minutes a day, five days a week, for 4 to 16 weeks, includes two components.

Read Naturally is an elementary and middle school supplemental reading program designed to improve reading fluency using a combination of books, audiotapes, and computer software. The program has three main strategies: repeated reading of text for developing oral reading fluency, teacher modeling of story reading, and systematic monitoring of student progress by teachers and the students themselves. Students work at a reading level appropriate for their achievement level, progress through the program at their own rate, and, for the most part, work on an independent basis. Read Naturally® can be used in a variety of settings, including classrooms, resource rooms, or computer or reading labs. Although the program was not originally developed for English language learners, additional materials for these students are currently available.

Words Their Way™ is an approach to phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction for students in kindergarten through high school. The program can be implemented as a core or supplemental curriculum and aims to provide a practical way to study words with students. The purpose of word study (which involves examining, manipulating, comparing, and categorizing words) is to reveal logic and consistencies within written language and to help students achieve mastery in recognizing, spelling, and defining specific words.

LANGUAGE!® is a language arts intervention designed for struggling learners in grades 3–12 who score below the 40th percentile on standardized literacy tests. The curriculum integrates English literacy acquisition skills into a six-step lesson format. During a daily lesson, students work on phonemic awareness and phonics (word decoding), word recognition and spelling (word encoding), vocabulary and morphology (word meaning), grammar and usage (understanding the form and function of words in context), listening and reading comprehension, and speaking and writing.

Talent Development Middle Grades Program (TDMG) is a whole school reform approach for large middle schools that face serious problems with student attendance, discipline, and academic achievement. The program includes both structural and curriculum reforms. It calls for schools to reorganize into small ”learning communities” of 200–300 students who attend classes in distinct areas of the school and stay together throughout their time in middle school. In addition to structural changes, schools adopting the program purchase one or more curricula that are intended to be developmentally appropriate and to engage students with culturally relevant content. For students who are behind in reading and math, the program provides additional periods devoted to these subjects that include group activities and computer-based lessons. To improve implementation, each school is assigned a team of “curriculum coaches” trained by the developer to work with school staff on a weekly basis to implement the program. In addition, teachers are offered professional development training, including monthly sessions designed to familiarize them with the program and demonstrate effective instructional approaches.

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies is a peer-tutoring program for grades K–6 that aims to improve student proficiency in several disciplines. During the 30-35 minute peer-tutoring sessions, students take turns acting at the tutor, coaching and correcting one another as they work through problems. The designation of tutoring pairs and skill assignment is based on teacher judgement of student needs and abilities, and teachers reassign tutoring pairs regularly.  

Success for All (SFA®) is a whole-school reform model (that is, a model that integrates curriculum, school culture, family, and community supports) for students in prekindergarten through grade 8. SFA® includes a literacy program, quarterly assessments of student learning, a social-emotional development program, computer-assisted tutoring tools, family support teams for students’ parents, a facilitator who works with school personnel, and extensive training for all intervention teachers. The literacy program emphasizes phonics for beginning readers and comprehension for all students. Teachers provide reading instruction to students grouped by reading ability for 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week. In addition, certified teachers or paraprofessionals provide daily tutoring to students who have difficulty reading at the same level as their classmates.

The Spalding Method® is a language arts program for grades K–6 that uses explicit, integrated instruction and multisensory techniques to teach spelling, writing, and reading. The program and its textbook, The Writing Road to Reading, provide 32 weeks of lesson plans. Students work on program materials in spelling, writing, and reading for 90–120 minutes every day.

The Spalding Method® is a language arts program for grades K–6 that uses explicit, integrated instruction and multisensory techniques to teach spelling, writing, and reading. The program and its textbook, The Writing Road to Reading, provide 32 weeks of lesson plans. Students work on program materials in spelling, writing, and reading for 90–120 minutes every day.

Open Court Reading© is a reading program for grades K–6 that is designed to teach decoding, comprehension, inquiry, and writing in a three-part progression. Part One of each unit, Preparing to Read, focuses on phonemic awareness, sounds and letters, phonics, fluency, and word knowledge. Part Two, Reading and Responding, emphasizes reading literature for understanding, comprehension, inquiry, and practical reading applications. Part Three, Language Arts, focuses on writing, spelling, grammar, usage, mechanics, and basic computer skills.

Reading Mastery is designed to provide systematic reading instruction to students in grades K–6. Reading Mastery can be used as an intervention program for struggling readers, as a supplement to a school’s core reading program, or as a stand-alone reading program, and is available in three versions. During the implementation of Reading Mastery, students are grouped with other students at a similar reading level, based on program placement tests. The program includes a continuous monitoring component.

Reading Edge is a middle school literacy program that emphasizes cooperative learning, goal setting, feedback, classroom management techniques, and the use of metacognitive strategy, whereby students assess their own skills and learn to apply new ones. The program is a component of the Success for All (SFA)^® whole-school reform model and provides eight levels of instruction, from beginning through eighth-grade reading levels. Students are grouped into classes based on ability, and whole-class reading instruction is delivered in daily 60-minute blocks. Instruction at the early levels uses fiction, nonfiction, and simple scripts to help students develop basic decoding skills, reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. At reading level 3 and higher, students focus on developing comprehension strategies using both narrative and expository texts. All levels focus on building background knowledge and developing study skills. Although the program is often implemented in the context of the SFA^® whole-school reform, this report focuses on Reading Edge as a stand-alone program in grades 4 and higher.

Milieu teaching is a practice that involves manipulating or arranging stimuli in a preschool child’s natural environment to create a setting that encourages them to engage in a targeted behavior. For example, a teacher might place a desirable toy in a setting to encourage a child to request that toy (where requesting a toy is the desired target behavior). Typically, milieu teaching involves four strategies that a teacher will utilize to encourage a child to demonstrate a target behavior: modeling, mand-modeling, incidental teaching, and time-delay. Through adult modeling and functional consequences associated with child requests, targeted language behaviors can be improved in children who may have language delays or disabilities.

The High School Puente Program aims to help disadvantaged students graduate from high school, become college eligible, and enroll in four-year colleges and universities. The program consists of the following components: 1) a 9th- and 10th-grade college preparatory English class that incorporates Mexican-American/Latino and other multicultural literature; 2) a four-year academic counseling program for students; and 3) student leadership and mentoring activities with volunteers from the local community. High School Puente is open to all students and is targeted to students from populations with low rates of enrollment at four-year colleges. Students are identified for the program at the end of their 8th-grade year through an application and selection process. Each High School Puente site is implemented by a team consisting of an academic counselor and an English teacher. These team members receive intensive initial training in program methodologies, along with ongoing training and support for as long as they implement the program. In addition to High School Puente, the Puente Program has a community college program model. The community college program does not fall within the WWC Dropout Prevention protocol.

Odyssey Reading, published by CompassLearning®, is a web-based K–12 reading/language arts program designed to allow for instructional differentiation and data-driven decision making. The online program includes electronic curricula and materials for individual or small-group work, assessments aligned with state curriculum standards, and a data management system that allows teachers to develop individualized instruction and assessment tools to track individual student and classroom performance.

Student team reading and writing refers to two cooperative learning programs for secondary students: (1) Student Team Reading and Writing and (2) Student Team Reading. The Student Team Reading and Writing program is an integrated approach to reading and language arts for early adolescents. Student Team Reading comprises the reading part of Student Team Reading and Writing and consists of two principal elements: (1) literature-related activities (including partner reading, treasure hunts, word mastery, story retelling, story-related writing, and quizzes) and (2) direct instruction in reading comprehension strategies (such as identifying main ideas and themes, drawing conclusions, making predictions, and understanding figurative language).

Great Books is a program that aims to improve the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills of students in kindergarten through high school. The program is implemented as a core or complementary curriculum and is based on the Shared Inquiry™ method of learning.

Repeated reading is an academic practice that aims to increase oral reading fluency. Repeated reading can be used with students who have developed initial word reading skills but demonstrate inadequate reading fluency for their grade level. During repeated reading, a student sits in a quiet location with a teacher and reads a passage aloud at least three times. Typically, the teacher selects a passage of about 50 to 200 words in length. If the student misreads a word or hesitates for longer than 5 seconds, the teacher reads the word aloud, and the student repeats the word correctly. If the student requests help with a word, the teacher reads the word aloud or provides the definition. The student rereads the passage until he or she achieves a satisfactory fluency level.

ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT) is a peer-assisted instructional strategy designed to be integrated with most existing reading curricula. This approach provides students with increased opportunities to practice reading skills by asking questions and receiving immediate feedback from a peer tutor. Pairs of students take turns tutoring each other to reinforce concepts and skills initially taught by the teacher. The teacher creates age-appropriate peer teaching materials for the peer tutors; these materials take into account tutees’ language skills and disabilities.

Book clubs provide a reading framework designed to supplement or organize regular classroom reading instruction for students in grades K-8. This review focuses on Book Club (Raphael & McMahon, 1994) and Literature Circles (Daniels, 2002), but it uses the general (lowercase) term book clubs to embrace both Literature Circles and Book Club activities, as well as small-group discussion activities that closely resemble either strategy but may leave out one or more key elements of these originally conceived instructional paradigms.

Corrective Reading is designed to promote reading accuracy (decoding), fluency, and comprehension skills of students in grade 3 or higher who are reading below their grade level. The program has four levels that correspond to students’ decoding skills. All lessons in the program are sequenced and scripted. Corrective Reading can be implemented in small groups of 4–5 students or in a whole-class format. Corrective Reading is intended to be taught in 45-minute lessons 4–5 times a week.

AVID is a college-readiness program whose primary goal is to prepare middle and high school students for enrollment in 4-year colleges through increased access to and support in advanced courses. The program, which focuses on underserved, middle-achieving students (defined as students earning B, C, and even D grades), places students in college preparatory classes (e.g., honors and Advancement Placement classes) while providing academic support through a daily elective period and ongoing tutorials.

Reciprocal teaching is an interactive instructional practice that aims to improve students’ reading comprehension by teaching strategies to obtain meaning from a text. The teacher and students take turns leading a dialogue regarding segments of the text. Students discuss with their teacher how to apply four comprehension strategies—generating questions, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting—to passages of text. During the early stages of reciprocal teaching, the teacher assumes primary responsibility for modeling how to use these strategies. As students become more familiar with the strategies, there is a gradual shift toward student responsibility for talking through the application of the strategies to the text.

Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction is a reading comprehension instructional program for grades 3–9 that integrates reading and science through activities and the use of science books during reading instruction. The program supplements a school’s standard science and reading curricula and offers instruction in reading strategies, scientific concepts, and inquiry skills. Concept- Oriented Reading Instruction intends to improve reading comprehension and increase reading engagement.

The Barton Reading & Spelling System® is a one-to-one tutoring system designed to improve the reading, writing, and spelling skills of children, teenagers, or adults who struggle due to dyslexia or another learning disability. Although the program is designed to be one-to-one, it may also be used in a small group setting, but each level will take longer to complete. The program is divided into ten levels, each with 10 to 15 lessons that cover the methodsand sequence of teaching reading, spelling, and writing.

Fundations® is a prevention and early-intervention program designed to help reduce reading and spelling failure.3 The program is aimed at students in grades K–3 and involves daily 30-minute lessons which focus on carefully-sequenced skills that include print knowledge, alphabet awareness, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, and vocabulary development. Fundations® is designed to complement existing literature-based reading programs in general education classes, but can also be used in small groups of low-achieving or learning disabled students for 40–60 minutes each day. Students rotate through different targeted interactive activities. The program is based on the principles of the Wilson Reading System®.

READ 180® is a reading program designed for struggling readers who are reading 2 or more years below grade level. It combines online and direct instruction, student assessment, and teacher professional development. READ 180® is delivered in 90-minute sessions that include whole-group instruction, three small-group rotations, and whole-class wrap-up. Small-group rotations include individualized instruction using an adaptive computer application, small-group instruction, and independent reading. READ 180® is designed for students in elementary through high school.

The Wilson Reading System® is a reading and writing program. It provides a curriculum for teaching reading and spelling to individuals of any age who have difficulty with written language. The Wilson Reading System® directly teaches the structure of words in the English language, aiming to help students learn the coding system for reading and spelling. The program provides interactive lesson plans and uses a sequential system with extensive controlled text. The Wilson Reading System® is structured to progress from phoneme segmentation to more challenging tasks, and seeks to improve sight word knowledge, fluency, vocabulary, oral expressive language development, and reading comprehension.

Read Naturally is an elementary and middle school supplemental reading program designed to improve reading fluency using a combination of books, audiotapes, and computer software. The program has three main strategies: repeated reading of text for developing oral reading fluency, teacher modeling of story reading, and systematic monitoring of student progress by teachers and the students themselves. Students work at a reading level appropriate for their achievement level, progress through the program at their own rate, and, for the most part, work on an independent basis. Read Naturally® can be used in a variety of settings, including classrooms, resource rooms, or computer or reading labs. Although the program was not originally developed for English language learners, additional materials for these students are currently available.

Project Read® is a multisensory language arts curriculum designed for use in a classroom or group setting. Two main objectives of the program are to use language in all its forms, and to use responsive instruction rather than preplanned textbook lessons. The program emphasizes direct instruction, and lessons move from letter-sounds to words, sentences, and stories. Project Read® has three strands: Phonics/Linguistics, Reading Comprehension, and Written Expression, which are integrated at all grade levels, though the emphasis of the specific strands differs by grade.

Reading Recovery® is an intervention that provides one-on-one tutoring to students in grade 1 with low literacy achievement. This supplemental program aims to improve student reading and writing skills by providing one-on-one tutoring, tailoring the content of each lesson to each student based on observations and analyses of the student strengths and weaknesses from prior lessons. Trained Reading Recovery® teachers deliver tutoring daily in 30-minute one-on-one sessions over the course of 12 to 20 weeks. Reading Recovery® teachers incorporate instruction in topics such as phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, writing, oral language, and motivation depending on student needs.

Accelerated Reader™ is a computerized supplementary reading program that provides guided reading instruction to students in grades K–12. It aims to improve students’ reading skills through reading practice and by providing frequent feedback on students’ progress to teachers. The Accelerated Reader™ program requires students to select and read a book based on their area of interest and reading level. Upon completion of a book, students take a computerized quiz based on the book’s content and vocabulary. Quiz performance allows teachers to monitor student progress and to identify students who may need additional reading assistance.

The High School Puente Program aims to help disadvantaged students graduate from high school, become college eligible, and enroll in four-year colleges and universities. The program consists of the following components: 1) a 9th- and 10th-grade college preparatory English class that incorporates Mexican-American/Latino and other multicultural literature; 2) a four-year academic counseling program for students; and 3) student leadership and mentoring activities with volunteers from the local community. High School Puente is open to all students and is targeted to students from populations with low rates of enrollment at four-year colleges. Students are identified for the program at the end of their 8th-grade year through an application and selection process. Each High School Puente site is implemented by a team consisting of an academic counselor and an English teacher. These team members receive intensive initial training in program methodologies, along with ongoing training and support for as long as they implement the program. In addition to High School Puente, the Puente Program has a community college program model. The community college program does not fall within the WWC Dropout Prevention protocol.

Talent Development Middle Grades Program (TDMG) is a whole school reform approach for large middle schools that face serious problems with student attendance, discipline, and academic achievement. The program includes both structural and curriculum reforms. It calls for schools to reorganize into small ”learning communities” of 200–300 students who attend classes in distinct areas of the school and stay together throughout their time in middle school. In addition to structural changes, schools adopting the program purchase one or more curricula that are intended to be developmentally appropriate and to engage students with culturally relevant content. For students who are behind in reading and math, the program provides additional periods devoted to these subjects that include group activities and computer-based lessons. To improve implementation, each school is assigned a team of “curriculum coaches” trained by the developer to work with school staff on a weekly basis to implement the program. In addition, teachers are offered professional development training, including monthly sessions designed to familiarize them with the program and demonstrate effective instructional approaches.

Developed by the Houghton Mifflin Company, an integrated K–82 reading and language arts program. The philosophy behind the program is that literacy instruction should stimulate, teach, and extend the communication and thinking skills that will allow students to become effective readers, writers, communicators, and lifelong learners. The program is structured around themes. It includes hands-on activities that allow students to collaborate or share information on a theme-related project with other classrooms around the world (for example, participating in a collaborative poem-writing exercise) and virtual field trips to Internet sites that have content, activities, and projects related to the theme.

Tools of the Mind is an early childhood curriculum for preschool and kindergarten children. The curriculum is designed to foster children’s executive function, which involves developing self-regulation, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Many activities emphasize both executive functioning and academic skills.

A literacy curriculum for preschool through third grade that introduces students to a book-a-week throughout the year. Students gain exposure to the book-of-the week through multiple formats. They receive a Big Book, a Take-Me-Home Book, an audio book, and a computerized version. The book-of-the-week serves as the basis of classroom and independent learning activities for that week. Classroom activities that focus on the book include: (1) teacher-led whole group instruction, (2) teacher-led small group instruction, and (3) independent learning activities including individualized computer instruction that allows students to progress at their own pace. Activities for preschoolers are designed to teach oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and concepts of print. Breakthrough to Literacy also includes professional development activities for teachers that are designed to help incorporate the Breakthrough to Literacy curriculum into their day-to-day activities and improve their classroom management skills.

Headsprout Early Reading is an online supplemental early literacy curriculum consisting of eighty 20-minute animated episodes. The episodes are designed to teach phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The program adapts to a child’s responses, providing additional instruction and review if a child does not choose the correct answer. Teachers may use stories based on the episodes to reinforce instruction provided in the lessons.

Headsprout Early Reading is an online supplemental early literacy curriculum consisting of eighty 20-minute animated episodes. The episodes are designed to teach phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The program adapts to a child’s responses, providing additional instruction and review if a child does not choose the correct answer. Teachers may use stories based on the episodes to reinforce instruction provided in the lessons.

The Barton Reading & Spelling System® is a one-to-one tutoring system designed to improve the reading, writing, and spelling skills of children, teenagers, or adults who struggle due to dyslexia or another learning disability. Although the program is designed to be one-to-one, it may also be used in a small group setting, but each level will take longer to complete. The program is divided into ten levels, each with 10 to 15 lessons that cover the methodsand sequence of teaching reading, spelling, and writing.

Academy of READING® is an online program, originally developed by AutoSkill International, that aims to improve students’ reading skills using a structured and sequential approach to learning. The program breaks the task of reading into manageable pieces and provides multiple opportunities for practice in five core areas—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The Barton Reading & Spelling System® is a one-to-one tutoring system designed to improve the reading, writing, and spelling skills of children, teenagers, or adults who struggle due to dyslexia or another learning disability. Although the program is designed to be one-to-one, it may also be used in a small group setting, but each level will take longer to complete. The program is divided into ten levels, each with 10 to 15 lessons that cover the methodsand sequence of teaching reading, spelling, and writing.

A literacy curriculum for preschool through third grade that introduces students to a book-a-week throughout the year. Students gain exposure to the book-of-the week through multiple formats. They receive a Big Book, a Take-Me-Home Book, an audio book, and a computerized version. The book-of-the-week serves as the basis of classroom and independent learning activities for that week. Classroom activities that focus on the book include: (1) teacher-led whole group instruction, (2) teacher-led small group instruction, and (3) independent learning activities including individualized computer instruction that allows students to progress at their own pace. Activities for preschoolers are designed to teach oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and concepts of print. Breakthrough to Literacy also includes professional development activities for teachers that are designed to help incorporate the Breakthrough to Literacy curriculum into their day-to-day activities and improve their classroom management skills.

Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction is a reading comprehension instructional program for grades 3–9 that integrates reading and science through activities and the use of science books during reading instruction. The program supplements a school’s standard science and reading curricula and offers instruction in reading strategies, scientific concepts, and inquiry skills. Concept- Oriented Reading Instruction intends to improve reading comprehension and increase reading engagement.

Fundations® is a prevention and early-intervention program designed to help reduce reading and spelling failure.3 The program is aimed at students in grades K–3 and involves daily 30-minute lessons which focus on carefully-sequenced skills that include print knowledge, alphabet awareness, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, and vocabulary development. Fundations® is designed to complement existing literature-based reading programs in general education classes, but can also be used in small groups of low-achieving or learning disabled students for 40–60 minutes each day. Students rotate through different targeted interactive activities. The program is based on the principles of the Wilson Reading System®.

Project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) is a tool developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University aimed at improving early literacy for children First through Fourth Grade.1 It is an automated Reading Tutor (RT) that displays stories on a computer screen, and listens to children read aloud. The RT lets children choose from a list of stories from multiple sources, including user-authored stories. RT responses are modeled after expert reading teachers and adapted to fit technological capabilities and limitations. It utilizes speech recognition technology to analyze children’s oral reading and intervenes and provides help when children read incorrectly, encounter difficulty, or click for help.

It is currently not a commercial product, but is utilized by many children who have participated in studies to test its effectiveness. The current version runs under Windows(TM) 2000 or XP on a computer with at least 128MB of memory.

Footnote:

1 Most of the information cited on this page are derived from Carnegie Mellon University’s Project LISTERN website: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~listen/

Project Read® is a multisensory language arts curriculum designed for use in a classroom or group setting. Two main objectives of the program are to use language in all its forms, and to use responsive instruction rather than preplanned textbook lessons. The program emphasizes direct instruction, and lessons move from letter-sounds to words, sentences, and stories. Project Read® has three strands: Phonics/Linguistics, Reading Comprehension, and Written Expression, which are integrated at all grade levels, though the emphasis of the specific strands differs by grade.

Read Well® is a reading curriculum to increase the literacy abilities of students in kindergarten and grade 1. The program provides instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. Students are given opportunities to discuss the vocabulary concepts that are presented in each story. The program is based on the tenets of scaffolded instruction, where teachers begin by presenting models, and gradually decrease their support by providing guided practice, before students are asked to complete the skill or strategy independently. For example, the student and teacher read new text aloud, with the teacher reading the difficult or irregular words. As student skills (and motivation) increase, the amount of teacher-read text decreases, and the student is given greater independence. The program combines daily whole class activities with small group lessons.

Pause, Prompt, and Praise is a technique originally designed to help parents improve their children’s levels of literacy. The technique is now used by many schools as part of their peer tutoring programs and is adapted for use in curricula such as daily reading. In this Shared Reading version of the technique, the peer tutor must listen to the tutee read continuous prose at the appropriate reading level. If the tutee makes a mistake, the tutor must wait five seconds (pause) for the tutee correct the error. If the child does not correct the error, the tutor prompts the tutee with the appropriate clues related to the story’s meaning. If the tutee does not solve the error after two attempts, the tutor corrects the student. Finally, the tutor is encouraged to praise the tutee as often as possible. The goal of the peer version of Pause, Prompt, and Praise is to increase reading ability in both the tutors and the tutees.

Sound Foundations, a literacy curriculum designed to teach phonological awareness to preliterate children, focuses exclusively on phoneme identity (that is, different words can start and end with the same sound). It works from the principle that phonemic awareness is necessary but not sufficient to reading. The curriculum is self-contained and can be used by teachers, parents, or teaching assistants.

In the Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) model, teachers assign students to heterogeneous teams of four to five. Team members are expected to cooperate to master specific content in a subject area. Cooperative teamwork is used in a context of a routine cycle of instruction that includes direct instruction, guided practice, team practice, individual assessment, and team rewards for success. Students can earn points for their team based on their improvement over their past performance rather than their absolute test score. Recognition is given to the teams in the class that qualify for various levels of awards based on the team’s mean. A variety of rewards, such as certificates or free time, can be used. According to the developer, the cooperative study structure, individual accountability, and equal opportunities for success create an engaging instructional process and strong motivations for team success.

Tribes is designed to teach peers collaborative group skills, social competence, and self-responsibility. According to the developer, it uses a research-based democratic process. Students are expected to commit to four “Tribes Community Agreements” that include attentive listening, mutual respect, no put downs, and positive participation. The peer learning groups develop shared goals, expectations for success, and caring support to each other. This intervention is designed for teachers to transfer responsibility to the peer assisted learning groups to work together on academic tasks, projects, and assessment of progress. The peer learning approach is designed for all types of students.

The SuccessMaker program is a set of computer-based courses used to supplement regular classroom reading instruction in grades K–8. Using adaptive lessons tailored to a student’s reading level, SuccessMaker aims to improve understanding in areas such as phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and concepts of print.

The SuccessMaker program is a set of computer-based courses used to supplement regular classroom reading instruction in grades K–8. Using adaptive lessons tailored to a student’s reading level, SuccessMaker aims to improve understanding in areas such as phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and concepts of print.

The SuccessMaker program is a set of computer-based courses used to supplement regular classroom reading instruction in grades K–8. Using adaptive lessons tailored to a student’s reading level, SuccessMaker aims to improve understanding in areas such as phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and concepts of print.

Direct Instruction refers to a family of interventions that includes all Direct Instruction products (DISTAR and Language for Learning), as well as to all versions past and present. Direct Instruction includes teaching techniques that are fast-paced, teacher-directed, and explicit with opportunities for student response and teacher reinforcement or correction.

Sound Foundations, a literacy curriculum designed to teach phonological awareness to preliterate children, focuses exclusively on phoneme identity (that is, different words can start and end with the same sound). It works from the principle that phonemic awareness is necessary but not sufficient to reading. The curriculum is self-contained and can be used by teachers, parents, or teaching assistants.

Words and Concepts is a computer software program that focuses on building oral language skills related to vocabulary, comprehension, word relationships, and other concepts. The program is comprised of six units—vocabulary, categorization, word identification by function, word association, concept of same, and concept of different. It can be used by adults and children with varying special needs, including language-learning disabilities, developmental disabilities, physical impairments, hearing and vision impairments, and autism.

Stepping Stones to Literacy (SSL) is a supplemental curriculum designed to promote listening, print conventions, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and serial processing/rapid naming (quickly naming familiar visual symbols and stimuli, such as letters or colors). The program targets older preschool and kindergarten students who are considered to be underachieving readers, based on teacher’s recommendations, assessments, and systematic screening. Students participate in 10- to 20-minute daily lessons in a small group or individually. The curriculum consists of 25 lessons, for a total of 9–15 hours of instructional time.

Open Court Reading© is a reading program for grades K–6 that is designed to teach decoding, comprehension, inquiry, and writing in a three-part progression. Part One of each unit, Preparing to Read, focuses on phonemic awareness, sounds and letters, phonics, fluency, and word knowledge. Part Two, Reading and Responding, emphasizes reading literature for understanding, comprehension, inquiry, and practical reading applications. Part Three, Language Arts, focuses on writing, spelling, grammar, usage, mechanics, and basic computer skills.

The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing® (LiPS®) program (formerly called the Auditory Discrimination in Depth® [ADD] program) is designed to teach students the skills they need to decode words and to identify individual sounds and blends in words. LiPS® is designed for emergent readers in kindergarten through grade 3 or for struggling, dyslexic readers. The program is individualized to meet students’ needs and is often used with students who have learning disabilities or difficulties. Initial activities engage students in discovering the lip, tongue, and mouth actions needed to produce specific sounds. After students are able to produce, label, and organize the sounds with their mouths, subsequent activities in sequencing, reading, and spelling use the oral aspects of sounds to identify and order them within words. The program also offers direct instruction in letter patterns, sight words, and context clues in reading.

This report presents the findings from an independent evaluation conducted by WestEd on the Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum (ERWC). Funded by an Investing in Innovation (i3) Validation grant, the ERWC is a grade 11 and grade 12 English language arts (ELA) curriculum developed by the California State University. The independent evaluation includes an evaluation of the fidelity of implementation of the curriculum and an impact evaluation that took place during the 2020/21 school year. The fidelity of implementation evaluation found that a high percentage of teachers participated in the professional learning with fidelity but that few teachers taught the full curriculum with fidelity, and these results were due to many factors, including time constraints and shifts in instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The grade 11 impact evaluation found that assignment to the ERWC had a positive and statistically significant impact on student achievement as measured by the Non-Performance Task Interim Comprehensive Assessment; however, no statistically significant impact was detected among the students who took the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessment. In the grade 12 impact evaluation, there was no statistically significant difference in achievement between students who had enrolled in the ERWC and students who had enrolled in the comparison English course. Further evaluation of the ERWC in a non-pandemic year during which schooling takes place in person is recommended.

Principals are the second-largest school-based contributor to K-12 students' academic progress. However, there is little research evaluating whether efforts to develop principals' skills improve school effectiveness. We conducted randomized controlled trial studies of the impacts of a professional development program called the Executive Development Program (EDP) and of the incremental effects of coaching to help principals implement the EDP curriculum. We find that the EDP alone influenced principals' practices, but not student achievement, within 3 years. Coaching had a small positive effect on students' English Language Arts achievement, but no effect on math achievement or on principals' practices. Coaching had the largest effects in disadvantaged schools. We hypothesize that coaching enhanced the quality of implementation of recommended practices.

This study examines the efficacy, cost, and implementation of an integrated science and literacy curriculum for kindergarten. The study was conducted in a large urban district and included 1,589 students in 71 classrooms in 21 schools. The research includes a multi-site cluster-randomized controlled trial and mixed-methods cost and implementation studies. Analysis revealed significant impacts on comprehension, letter-naming fluency, and motivation to read. No main impacts were observed on decoding, word identification, or writing; however, exploratory analysis revealed that students whose teachers implemented the treatment with fidelity performed statistically significantly better in writing and decoding. The cost to produce the observed effects was estimated at $480 per student, two-thirds of which was borne by the school. Despite this cost, treatment classrooms achieved savings by using an average of three fewer instructional programs than control classrooms. Teachers reported positive effects from the integrated curriculum on student engagement, learning, and behavior.

This study examines the impacts of two AmeriCorps programs, Minnesota Reading Corps and Wisconsin Reading Corps, where AmeriCorps volunteers provide literacy tutoring to at-risk kindergarten through third-grade (K-3) students utilizing a response-to-intervention framework. This evaluation replicates a prior randomized controlled trial evaluation of the program 4 years later and for the first time evaluates the program model replicated in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The results of the two evaluations showed that kindergarten and first-grade students who received a single semester of Reading Corps tutoring achieved significantly higher literacy assessment scores, and demonstrated meaningful and significant effects after a full-school year of the intervention for second- and third-grade students.

This is the first study to provide experimental evidence of the impact of corequisite remediation for students underprepared in reading and writing. We examine the short-term impacts of three different approaches to corequisite remediation that were implemented at five large urban community colleges in Texas, and we explore whether corequisites have differential impacts on students with different characteristics. Results from three first-time-in-college cohorts indicate that corequisite remediation increased the probability of completing a first college-level English course within one year by 24 percentage points and within two years by 18 percentage points. The impacts were positive for all three of the corequisite models examined and for traditionally underrepresented groups, including Hispanic students, first-generation college students, and students whose first language is not English. We saw modest positive impacts on the accumulation of college credits but no effect on persistence in college.

Many talented students in under-resourced schools do not reach their full potential. Research shows that by sixth grade, children born into poverty have likely spent 6,000 fewer hours learning than their middle-class counterparts. Higher Achievement, an intensive summer and after-school program, aims to close that learning gap. It offers participants more than 500 hours of academic enrichment activities a year to help them meet the high academic standards expected of college-bound students. Known as "scholars"; Higher Achievement students enter the program during the summer before either fifth or sixth grade and commit to attending through eighth grade. The summer program consists of six weeks of morning classes in English Language Arts (ELA), math, science, and, in some centers, social studies, followed by enrichment activities in the afternoon, including chess, cooking, art, and soccer. During the school year, in addition to the program's regular study hall and enrichment activities, a cadre of mostly young professionals volunteer one day a week, delivering 75-minute ELA or math lessons to small groups of scholars. These volunteers receive detailed lesson plans and training so they can successfully execute the program's rigorous curricula. Part of what makes Higher Achievement affordable is its use of volunteers in this way. An earlier experimental evaluation of Metro DC, Higher Achievement's flagship affiliate in Washington, DC, and Alexandria, Virginia, found that the program was effective in improving academic performance two years after students applied. Since then, Higher Achievement has expanded to three new cities: Baltimore, Maryland; Richmond, Virginia; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Keenly aware that many effective flagship programs fail to be effective in new locations, the federal government funded an experimental validation study to examine the impacts at these expansion sites. Eligible students were randomly assigned either to a program group that could participate in Higher Achievement, or to a control group that could not enroll in the program. Comparing the two groups' outcomes provided an estimate of the program's impacts. The study found that the expansion sites experienced many of the implementation challenges common to school-based, out-of-school-time programs (for example, staff turnover, coordination with the host school, and lower-than-hoped-for attendance by middle school students), as well as those often seen in new programs (such as a lack of strong relationships with key partners and difficulty recruiting volunteers). Even so, Higher Achievement was found to be at least adequately implemented in all three cities. The study found that the program's detailed lesson plans, with scripted questions and student instructions, enabled the volunteers to deliver rigorous academic lessons. This report addresses the following questions: (1) How did the Higher Achievement centers operate during the study and what lessons are there for similar programs?; (2) Did scholars receive more academic enrichment over the two-year study period than they would have received without Higher Achievement?; and (3) How did Higher Achievement impact scholars' grades and test scores over the two years since they applied?

The purpose of this study was to examine the treatment effects of the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management (IY TCM), a universal classroom management intervention, on the outcomes of children with aggressive behavior in elementary school. Classroom management has been demonstrated as a factor in either escalating children's aggressive behavior or decreasing those problematic behaviors. Participants included 1,817 students (Grade K to 3) and 105 teachers from nine elementary schools in a large urban Midwestern school district. Teachers were randomly assigned to receive IY TCM or to a wait-list comparison group. The hypotheses were that baseline levels of aggression would moderate the relationship between intervention status and outcomes. Findings indicated the hypothesized moderation effect on several outcome variables; specifically, children with baseline aggression problems who were in IY TCM classrooms had significantly improved math achievement, emotional regulation, prosocial behaviors, and observed aggression in comparison to similar peers in the control classrooms. Implications for practice and future research based on the findings are discussed.

Preschool teachers from a high-poverty, urban school district were trained to implement Story Talk, a book reading intervention designed to increase children's vocabulary and language development using supportive materials and strategic individualized coaching. Thirty-five teachers were randomly assigned by site to the intervention (20) or the control condition (15). Teachers in the intervention were provided with training; one-to-one, bi-monthly coaching; and Story Maps that included target vocabulary, open-ended questions to promote conversations during book reading, and suggested extension activities that support use of target vocabulary. The results suggested that teachers in the intervention increased on the global quality of their instruction, as well as on their fidelity to the project's strategies and their use of target vocabulary words. In addition, children in the intervention classrooms performed significantly better on measures of taught vocabulary words, and HLM analyses found gains on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4 (d?=?0.19) and the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test-4 (d?=?0.14), both standardized measures of vocabulary development. The results suggest that Story Talk holds promise as a relatively resource-conservative PD intervention that can be implemented with fidelity and can significantly improve children's vocabulary development, especially among children in high-poverty schools.

We investigated whether individual differences in overall receptive vocabulary knowledge measured at the beginning of the year moderated the effects of a kindergarten vocabulary intervention that supplemented classroom vocabulary instruction. We also examined whether moderation would offset the benefits of providing Tier-2 vocabulary intervention within a multitiered-system-of-support (MTSS) or response-to-intervention framework. Participants included students from two previous studies identified as at risk for language and learning difficulties who were randomly assigned in clusters to receive small-group vocabulary intervention in addition to classroom vocabulary instruction (n = 825) or to receive classroom vocabulary instruction only (n = 781). A group of not-at-risk students (n = 741) who received classroom vocabulary instruction served as a reference group. Initial vocabulary knowledge measured at pretest moderated the impact of intervention on experimenter-developed measures of expressive vocabulary learning and listening comprehension favoring students with higher initial vocabulary knowledge. Tier-2 intervention substantially counteracted the Matthew effect for target word learning. Intervention effects on listening comprehension depended on students' initial vocabulary knowledge. Implications present benefits and challenges of supporting vocabulary learning within an MTSS framework.

The recent wave of test-based accountability reforms has negatively impacted the provision of K-12 arts educational experiences. Advocates contend that, in addition to providing intrinsic benefits, the arts can positively influence academic and social development. However, the empirical evidence to support such claims is limited. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 10,548 3rd-8th grade students who were enrolled in 42 schools that were assigned by lottery to receive substantial influxes of arts education experiences provided through school-community partnerships with local arts organizations, cultural institutions, and teaching-artists. We find that these increases in arts educational experiences significantly reduce the proportion of students receiving disciplinary infractions by 3.6 percentage points, improve STAAR writing achievement by 0.13 of a standard deviation, and increase students' compassion for others by 0.08 of a standard deviation. For students in elementary schools, which comprise 86 percent of the sample, we find that these arts educational experiences also significantly improve school engagement, college aspirations, and arts-facilitated empathy. These findings provide strong evidence that arts educational experiences can produce significant positive impacts on student academic and social development. Policymakers should consider these multifaceted educational benefits when assessing the role and value of the arts in K-12 schools.

This is the final report of a large-scale independent evaluation of the Building Assets and Reducing Risks (BARR) model in ninth grade in eleven high schools in Maine, California, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Texas. This sample of schools included large and small schools in urban, suburban, and rural areas, serving students from a wide range of demographic and socio-economic backgrounds. Funded with a validation grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program and carried out by researchers at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), this evaluation used random assignment of ninth-grade students to BARR and control conditions to estimate the impacts of the BARR model after one year. The evaluation also assessed the fidelity of implementation of BARR in the eleven study schools and identified barriers to and facilitators of successful implementation. The evaluation focused on several teacher- and student-level outcomes. The teacher outcomes included measures of teacher collaboration, and use of data, among others. The academic outcomes included course failure, students' grade point average (GPA), and performance on the Northwest Evaluation Association's (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) standardized reading and mathematics assessments. Student-reported experiences included measures of supportive relationships, perceptions of teachers' expectations of them, student engagement, and others. In addition to these outcomes, the report includes impact estimates for attendance, suspensions, and persistence into 10th grade. [This report was written with Brenna O'Brien, Cheryl Graczewski, So Jung Park, Feng Liu, Ethan Adelman-Sil, Lynn Hu.]

Reading Recovery is an example of a widely used early literacy intervention for struggling first-grade readers, with a research base demonstrating evidence of impact. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education's i3 program, researchers conducted a 4-year evaluation of the national scale-up of Reading Recovery. The evaluation included an implementation study and a multisite randomized controlled trial with 6,888 participating students in 1,222 schools. The goal of this study was to understand whether the impacts identified in prior rigorous studies of Reading Recovery could be replicated in the context of a national scale-up. The findings of this study reaffirm prior evidence of Reading Recovery's immediate impacts on student literacy and support the feasibility of successfully scaling up an effective intervention.

This report presents the findings from an efficacy trial and process evaluation of the Parent Engagement Programme (PEP). The PEP was a school-level intervention designed to improve pupil outcomes by engaging parents in their children's learning. The programme was developed collaboratively by research teams from the University of Bristol and Harvard University and was delivered between September 2014 and July 2015. The study was conducted by the Centre for Effective Education, Queen's University Belfast between February 2014 and February 2016. The trial involved 15,697 students in Years 7, 9, and 11 from 36 English secondary schools, with schools sending an average of 30 texts to each parent over the period of the trial. The developers of the intervention managed its delivery to ensure optimal implementation. It was a cluster randomised controlled trial with randomisation at the Key Stage level, designed to determine the impact of the intervention on the academic outcomes of students in English, maths, and science, and the impact on absenteeism. A process evaluation used focus groups, telephone surveys, interviews, and an online survey to provide data on implementation and to capture the perceptions and experiences of participating parents, pupils, and teachers. Key conclusions include: (1) Children who had the intervention experienced about one month of additional progress in maths compared to other children. This positive result is unlikely to have occurred by chance; (2) Children who had the intervention had reduced absenteeism compared to other children. This positive result is unlikely to have occurred by chance; (3) Children who had the intervention appeared to experience about one month of additional progress in English compared to other children. However, analysis suggests that this finding might have been affected by bias introduced by missing data, so evaluators cannot reliably draw this conclusion. There is no evidence to suggest that the intervention had an impact on science attainment; (4) Schools embraced the programme and liked its immediacy and low cost. Many respondents felt that the presence of a dedicated coordinator would be valuable to monitor the accuracy and frequency of texts. Schools should consider whether they would be able to provide this additional resource; and (5) The vast majority of parents were accepting of the programme, including the content, frequency, and timing of texts. [Note: The post-reporting appendix was added in June 2017.]

This study examined the efficacy of a supplemental, multicomponent adolescent reading intervention for middle school students who scored below proficient on a state literacy assessment. Using a within-school experimental design, the authors randomly assigned 483 students in grades 6-8 to a business-as-usual control condition or to the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention (STARI), a supplemental reading program involving instruction to support word-reading skills, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, and peer talk to promote reading engagement and comprehension. The authors assessed behavioral engagement by measuring how much of the STARI curricular activities students completed during an academic school year, and collected intervention teachers' ratings of their students' reading engagement. STARI students outperformed control students on measures of word recognition (Cohen's d = 0.20), efficiency of basic reading comprehension (Cohen's d = 0.21), and morphological awareness (Cohen's d = 0.18). Reading engagement in its behavioral form, as measured by students' participation and involvement in the STARI curriculum, mediated the treatment effects on each of these three posttest outcomes. Intervention teachers' ratings of their students' emotional and cognitive engagement explained unique variance on reading posttests. Findings from this study support the hypothesis that (a) behavioral engagement fosters struggling adolescents' reading growth, and (b) teachers' perceptions of their students' emotional and cognitive engagement further contribute to reading competence.

With national focus on reading and math achievement, science and social studies have received less instructional time. Yet, accumulating evidence suggests that content knowledge is an important predictor of proficient reading. Starting with a design study, we developed content-area literacy instruction (CALI) as an individualized (or personalized) instructional program for kindergarteners through 4th graders to build science and social studies knowledge. We developed CALI to be implemented in general education classrooms, over multiple iterations (n = 230 students), using principles of design-based implementation research. The aims were to develop CALI as a usable and feasible instructional program that would, potentially, improve science and social studies knowledge, and could be implemented during the literacy block without negatively affecting students' reading gains (i.e., no opportunity cost). We then evaluated the efficacy of CALI in a randomized controlled field trial with 418 students in kindergarten through 4th grade. Results reveal that CALI demonstrates promise as a usable and feasible instructional individualized general education program, and is efficacious in improving social studies (d = 2.2) and science (d = 2.1) knowledge, with some evidence of improving oral and reading comprehension skills (d = 0.125).

UPSTART is a federally funded i3 validation project that uses a computer-based program to develop the school readiness skills of preschool children in rural Utah. Researchers used a randomized control trial design to evaluate the impact of the program in advancing children's early literacy skills. Preschoolers in the experimental group were randomly assigned to the UPSTART Reading software, while control group students were assigned to UPSTART Math. Standardized early literacy assessments were administered prior to program commencement and upon completion. Results revealed that there was a significant difference in children's mean scores on measures of letter knowledge and phonological awareness, after controlling for prior knowledge, missing pre-test data, and children's school district between those who participated in UPSTART Reading and those in the comparison group. There were no differences between the two groups on assessments measuring vocabulary and oral language or listening comprehension.

Using data from seven cohorts of language immersion lottery applicants in a large, urban school district, we estimate the causal effects of immersion programs on students' test scores in reading, mathematics, and science, and on English learners' (EL) reclassification. We estimate positive intent-to-treat (ITT) effects on reading performance in fifth and eighth grades, ranging from 13 to 22 percent of a standard deviation, reflecting 7 to 9 months of learning. We find little benefit in terms of mathematics and science performance, but also no detriment. By sixth and seventh grade, lottery winners' probabilities of remaining classified as EL are three to four percentage points lower than those of their counterparts. This effect is stronger for ELs whose native language matches the partner language. [This article was published in: "American Educational Research Journal" v54 n1 suppl p282S-306S Apr 2017 (EJ1155308).]

The purpose of this report is to present the results of a two-year randomized control trial evaluation of the SPARK literacy program. SPARK is an early grade literacy program developed by Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee. In 2010, SPARK was awarded an Investing in Innovation (i3) Department of Education grant to further develop the program and test its impact in seven Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). The evaluation used a randomized control trial selection to test the impact of SPARK across three domains: reading achievement, literacy, and school attendance. Informed consent was obtained from 576 parents for their students to participate in the study. A random sample of kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade students in seven MPS schools was selected in October and November of 2013 to participate. 286 students were randomly selected as SPARK participants and 290 students were randomly selected as control students. Stratification was done by school and grade level within school. The specific number of students selected to receive SPARK within each strata was determined both by the number of consented students and the capacity to serve students within each site. Students with a reading-related IEP or who were English Language Learners were not eligible to participate in the evaluation but were eligible to receive tutoring. All other students were eligible to participate. The results suggest that SPARK had statistically significant, positive impacts on reading achievement, literacy, and regular school day attendance. Tables are appended. [SREE documents are structured abstracts of SREE conference symposium, panel, and paper or poster submissions.]

This study reports the results of a cluster RCT evaluating the impact of Enhanced Core Reading Instruction on reading achievement of grade 1 at-risk readers. Forty-four elementary schools, blocked by district, were randomly assigned to condition. In both conditions, at-risk readers received 90 minutes of whole-group instruction (Tier 1) plus an additional 30 minutes of daily, small-group intervention (Tier 2). In the treatment condition, Tier 1 instruction included enhancements to the core program and Tier 2 intervention was highly aligned with the core program. In the comparison condition, Tier 1 instruction used the same core program as treatment schools in the district and Tier 2 intervention followed standard district protocol. Significant treatment effects were found on measures of phonemic decoding and oral reading fluency from fall to winter and word reading from fall to spring. Student- and classroom-level variables predicted student response to instruction differentially by condition.

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term, one-to-one intervention designed to help the lowest achieving readers in first grade. This article presents first-year results from the multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) and implementation study under the $55 million Investing in Innovation (i3) Scale-Up Project. For the 2011-2012 school year, the estimated standardized effect of RR on students' Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Total Reading Scores was 0.69 standard deviations relative to the population of struggling readers eligible for RR under the i3 scale-up and 0.47 standard deviations relative to the nationwide population of all first graders. School-level implementation of RR was, in most respects, faithful to the RR "Standards and Guidelines," and the intensive training provided to new RR teachers was viewed as critical to successful implementation.

A multisite cluster randomized trial was conducted to examine the effects of the Social Skills Improvement System Classwide Intervention Program (SSIS-CIP; Elliott & Gresham, 2007) on students' classroom social behavior. The final sample included 432 students across 38 second grade classrooms. Social skills and problem behaviors were measured via the SSIS rating scale for all participants, and direct observations were completed for a subsample of participants within each classroom. Results indicated that the SSIS-CIP demonstrated positive effects on teacher ratings of participants' social skills and internalizing behaviors, with the greatest changes occurring in classrooms with students who exhibited lower skill proficiency prior to implementation. Statistically significant differences were not observed between treatment and control participants on teacher ratings of externalizing problem behaviors or direct observation.

This study reports on an evaluation of the "Reading Partners" program, which uses community volunteers to provide one-on-one tutoring to struggling readers in underresourced elementary schools. Established in 1999 in East Menlo Park, California, the mission of "Reading Partners" is to help children become lifelong readers by empowering communities to provide individualized instruction with measurable results. This report builds on those initial findings by describing the "Reading Partners" program and its implementation in greater detail, exploring whether the program is more or less effective for particular subgroups of students, and assessing some of the potential explanations for the program's success to date. In addition, this report includes an analysis of the cost of implementing the Reading Partners program in 6 of the 19 sites. The following are appended: (1) Implementation Study Methods; (2) Impact Study Methods and Teacher Survey; (3) Tutor Background Characteristics and Additional Impact Findings; (4) Cost Study Methods; and (5) Additional Cost Findings. [This report was written with A. Brooks Bowden and Yilin Pan.]

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. Prior studies (see Tuttle et al. 2013) have consistently found that attending a KIPP middle school positively affects student achievement, but few have addressed longer-term outcomes and no rigorous research exists on impacts of KIPP schools at levels other than middle school. In this first high-quality study to rigorously examine the impacts of the network of KIPP public charter schools at all elementary and secondary grade levels, Mathematica found that KIPP schools have positive impacts on student achievement, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels. In addition, the study found positive impacts on student achievement for new entrants to the KIPP network in high school. For students continuing from a KIPP middle school, KIPP high schools' impacts on student achievement are not statistically significant, on average (in comparison to students who did not have the option to attend a KIPP high school and instead attended a mix of other non-KIPP charter, private, and traditional public high schools). Among these continuing students, KIPP high schools have positive impacts on several aspects of college preparation, including more discussions about college, increased likelihood of applying to college, and more advanced coursetaking. This report provides detailed findings and also includes the following appendices: (1) List of KIPP Schools In Network; (2) Detail on Survey Outcomes; (3) Cumulative Middle and High School Results; (4) Detailed Analytic Methods: Elementary School (Lottery-Based Analyses); (5) Detailed Analytic Methods: Middle School (Lottery-Based Analyses); (6) Understanding the Effects of KIPP As It Scales Mathematica Policy Research; (7) Detailed Analytic Methods: Middle School (Matched-Student Analyses); (8) Detailed Analytic Methods: High School (Matched-Student Analyses); (9) Detailed Analytic Methods: High School (Matched-School Analyses); and (10) Detailed Tables For What Works Clearinghouse Review. [For the executive summary, see ED560080; for the focus brief, see ED560043.]

Success for All (SFA), one of the best-known school reform models, aims to improve the reading skills of all children but is especially directed at schools that serve large numbers of students from low-income families. First implemented in 1987, SFA combines a challenging reading program, whole-school reform elements, and an emphasis on continuous improvement, with the goal of ensuring that every child learns to read well in the elementary grades. This is the third and final report from an independent evaluation of the scale-up demonstration of the SFA elementary school reading program. Both the demonstration and the evaluation have been funded under the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) competition. Conducted by MDRC--a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization--the evaluation examines SFA's implementation and impacts in five school districts over a three-year period (the 2011-2012 school year through the 2013-2014 school year). It also includes an analysis of program costs. Finally, it considers the scale-up process itself--the methods employed and the extent to which the Success for All Foundation (SFAF), the organization that developed and provides technical assistance to schools operating the program, achieved its scale-up goals. [This report was written with Emma Alterman, Herbert Collado, and Emily Pramik. For the executive summary of this report, see ED579090. For the Early Findings report, see ED545452. For the Interim Report, see ED546642.]

Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC) is the largest AmeriCorps State program in the country. The goal of MRC is to ensure that students become successful readers and meet reading proficiency targets by the end of the third grade. To meet this goal, the MRC program, and its host organization, ServeMinnesota Action Network, recruit, train, place and monitor AmeriCorps members to implement research-based literacy enrichment activities and interventions for at-risk Kindergarten through third grade (K-3) students and preschool children. Starting in 2011, the "Corporation for National and Community Service" (CNCS) sponsored a randomized controlled trial (RCT) impact evaluation of over 1,300 K-3 students at 23 participating schools who were determined to be eligible for the MRC program during the 2012-2013 school year. The goal of the impact evaluation was to determine both the short- and long-term impacts of the MRC program on elementary students' literacy outcomes. Key findings from the evaluation include: (1) Kindergarten, first, and third grade students who received MRC tutoring achieved significantly higher literacy assessment scores than students who did not; (2) MRC tutoring resulted in statistically significant impacts across multiple racial groups. In Kindergarten and first grade tutoring was effective despite important risk factors, including Dual Language Learner status and Free and Reduced Price Lunch eligibility; and (3) The MRC program is replicable in multiple school settings using AmeriCorps members with varied backgrounds. The study provides details of the: Impact Evaluation Methodology, School and Student Selection, Data Collection, Analysis, and Findings and Conclusions. [For the Appendices, see ED560019.]

Teach For America (TFA) and the Teaching Fellows programs are an important and growing source of teachers of hard-to-staff subjects in high-poverty schools, but comprehensive evidence of their effectiveness has been limited. This report presents findings from the first large-scale random assignment study of secondary math teachers from these programs. The study separately examined the effectiveness of TFA and Teaching Fellows teachers, comparing secondary math teachers from each program with other secondary math teachers teaching the same math courses in the same schools. The study focused on secondary math because this is a subject in which schools face particular staffing difficulties.The study had two main findings, one for each program studied: (1) TFA teachers were more effective than the teachers with whom they were compared. On average, students assigned to TFA teachers scored 0.07 standard deviations higher on end-of-year math assessments than students assigned to comparison teachers, a statistically significant difference. This impact is equivalent to an additional 2.6 months of school for the average student nationwide; and (2) Teaching Fellows were neither more nor less effective than the teachers with whom they were compared. On average, students of Teaching Fellows and students of comparison teachers had similar scores on end-of-year math assessments. By providing rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of secondary math teachers from TFA and the Teaching Fellows programs, the study can shed light on potential approaches for improving teacher effectiveness in hard-to-staff schools and subjects. The study findings can provide guidance to school principals faced with the choice of hiring teachers who have entered the profession via different routes to certification. The findings can also aid policymakers and funders of teacher preparation programs by providing information on the effectiveness of teachers from various routes to certification that use different methods to identify, attract, train, and support their teachers. Seven appendixes present: (1) Supplementary Technical Information on Study Design and Data Collection; (2) Supplementary Information on Analytic Methods; (3) Supplementary Information on Teach For America and Teaching Fellows Programs; (4) Teach For America and Teaching Fellows Teachers Compared with Comparison Teachers by Entry Route (Alternative or Traditional); (5) Supplementary Information on Teach For America and Teaching Fellows Teachers Compared with Comparison Teachers; (6) Supplementary Analyses of the Impacts of Teach For America and Teaching Fellows Teachers; and (7) Supplementary Findings on Factors Associated with Teacher Effectiveness. (Contains 96 tables, 21 figures, and 30 footnotes.)

In 2002, New York City embarked on an ambitious and wide-ranging series of education reforms. At the heart of its high school reforms were three interrelated changes: the institution of a district wide high school choice process for all rising ninth-graders, the closure of 31 large, failing high schools with an average graduation rate of 40 percent, and the opening of more than 200 new small high schools. Over half of the new small schools created between the fall of 2002 and the fall of 2008 were intended to serve students in some of the district's most disadvantaged communities and are located mainly in neighborhoods where large, failing high schools had been closed. MDRC has previously released two reports on these "small schools of choice," or SSCs (so called because they are small, are academically nonselective, and were created to provide a realistic choice for students with widely varying academic backgrounds). Those reports found marked increases in progress toward graduation and in graduation rates for the cohorts of students who entered SSCs in the falls of 2005 and 2006. The second report also found that the increase in graduation rates applied to every student subgroup examined, and that SSC graduation effects were sustained even after five years from the time sample members entered high school. This report updates those previous findings with results from a third cohort of students, those who entered ninth grade in the fall of 2007. In addition, for the first time it includes a look inside these schools through the eyes of principals and teachers, as reported in interviews and focus groups held at the 25 SSCs with the strongest evidence of effectiveness. In brief, the report's findings are: (1) SSCs in New York City continue to markedly increase high school graduation rates for large numbers of disadvantaged students of color, even as graduation rates are rising at the schools with which SSCs are compared; (2) The best evidence that exists indicates that SSCs may increase graduation rates for two new subgroups for which findings were not previously available: special education students and English language learners. However, given the still-limited sample sizes for these subgroups, the evidence will not be definitive until more student cohorts can be added to the analysis; and (3) Principals and teachers at the 25 SSCs with the strongest evidence of effectiveness strongly believe that academic rigor and personal relationships with students contribute to the effectiveness of their schools. They also believe that these attributes derive from their schools' small organizational structures and from their committed, knowledgeable, hardworking, and adaptable teachers. Appended are: (1) Sample, Data, and Analysis; (2) Estimated Effects of Winning a Student's First SSC Lottery; (3) 2008 Requirements for Proposals to Create New SSCs Specified by the New York City Department of Education; and (4) Documentation for Interviews and Focus Groups.

One way to improve struggling schools' access to effective teachers is to use selective transfer incentives. Such incentives offer bonuses for the highest-performing teachers to move into schools serving the most disadvantaged students. In this report, we provide evidence from a randomized experiment that tested whether such a policy intervention can improve student test scores and other outcomes in low-achieving schools. The intervention, known to participants as the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI), was implemented in 10 school districts in seven states. The highest-performing teachers in each district--those who ranked in roughly the top 20 percent within their subject and grade span in terms of raising student achievement year after year (an approach known as value added)--were identified. These teachers were offered $20,000, paid in installments over a two-year period, if they transferred into and remained in designated schools that had low average test scores. The main findings from the study include: (1) The transfer incentive successfully attracted high value-added teachers to fill targeted vacancies; (2) The transfer incentive had a positive impact on test scores (math and reading) in targeted elementary classrooms; and (3) The transfer incentive had a positive impact on teacher-retention rates during the payout period; retention of the high-performing teachers who transferred was similar to their counterparts in the fall immediately after the last payout. Seven appendixes are included: (1) Supplemental Materials for Chapters I and II; (2) Value-Added Analysis to Identify Highest-Performing Teachers; (3) Supplemental Materials for Chapter III; (4) Identification of Focal Teachers; (5) Supplemental Materials for Chapter IV; (6) Supplemental Materials for Chapter V; and (7) Supplemental Materials for Chapter VI. (Contains 114 footnotes, 61 figures, and 92 tables.) [For the executive summary, see ED544268.]

One crucial decision that middle schoolers (and their families) make is where they will attend high school. Many districts employ school choice systems designed to allow students to pick a high school that will meet their needs and interests. Yet most students prefer high schools that are close to home, and for youth in low-income neighborhoods, this often means attending a more disadvantaged, lower performing school (Nathanson et al. 2013). Youth who defy these odds and choose a competitive high school instead have much to gain. Cullen et al. (2005), for instance, found that Chicago public middle school students who chose to attend a higher-achieving high school were substantially more likely to graduate. However, even as eighth graders, these students already differed in many ways from their peers who chose a neighborhood school--they had better self-reported grades and higher expectations for the future, felt more prepared for high school, and were more likely to have spoken with their parents about what school to attend. These findings raise the question of how we can prepare more disadvantaged students to take the many steps necessary-throughout the middle school years-to successfully transition to a competitive, high-quality high school that can ultimately launch them toward college and careers. The Washington, DC-based Higher Achievement program is taking on this challenge. Higher Achievement targets rising fifth and sixth graders from "at-risk communities" and serves them throughout the middle school years. Its goal is to strengthen participants' academic skills, attitudes and behaviors, reinforce high aspirations and help students and their families navigate the process of applying to and selecting a high-quality high school. In 2006, the authors began a comprehensive multi-year evaluation of Higher Achievement to test its impact on participants' academic performance, attitudes and behaviors and on their high school enrollment. The evaluation used random assignment-the most rigorous design available to researchers-to assess program impacts. This brief summarizes the study's findings. Findings suggest that the program does appear to expand the options available to its students by making them more likely to apply to and attend private schools and less likely to apply to and attend weaker public magnet and charter schools. This, in turn, may position youth for better outcomes in high school and beyond. [This research was made possible by grants from The Atlantic Philanthropies, Bank of America, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, The Wallace Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation.]

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term early intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving readers in first grade reach average levels of classroom performance in literacy. Students identified to receive Reading Recovery meet individually with a specially trained Reading Recovery (RR) teacher every school day for 30-minute lessons over a period of 12 to 20 weeks. The purpose of these lessons is to support rapid acceleration of each child's literacy learning. In 2010, The Ohio State University received a Scaling Up What Works grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund to expand the use of Reading Recovery across the country. The award was intended to fund the scale-up of Reading Recovery by training 3,675 new RR Teachers in U.S. schools, thereby expanding capacity to allow service to an additional 88,200 students. The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) was contracted to conduct an independent evaluation of the i3 scale up of Reading Recovery over the course of five years. The evaluation includes parallel rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental designs for estimating program impacts, coupled with a large-scale mixed-methods study of program implementation under the i3 scale-up. This report presents findings through the second year of the evaluation. The primary goals of this evaluation were: (1) to assess the success of the scale-up in meeting the i3 grant's expansion goals; (2) to document the implementation of scale-up and fidelity to program standards; and (3) to provide experimental evidence of the impacts of Reading Recovery on student learning under this scale-up effort. This document is the first in a series of three annual reports produced based on our external evaluation of the Reading Recovery i3 Scale-Up. This report presents early results from the experimental impact and implementation studies conducted over the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years. An appendix includes: Statistical Model for Impacts of Reading Scores. [For "WWC Review of the Report 'Evaluation of the i3 Scale-up of Reading Recovery Year One Report, 2011-12.' What Works Clearinghouse Single Study Review," see ED547670.]

This study estimates the effect of one year of Fusion Reading implementation, a multistrategy intervention, builds on the work of the Strategic Instruction Model's Learning Strategies Curriculum and Xtreme Reading by integrating some of the same strategies (e.g., paraphrasing, visual imagery, and self-questioning for information acquisition; mnemonics for information study; and writing and error monitoring for information expression), focusing on reading, and extending the time frame from 1 to 2 years in duration. Specifically, the study addressed the following: (1) What are the intent-to-treat impacts of the Fusion Reading intervention on the reading outcomes and motivation to read of struggling readers after receipt of 1 year of the intervention?; (2) For which students are the interventions most and least effective?; and (3) In what ways are implementation factors associated with impacts (or lack of impacts) on reading and motivation outcomes? The authors conducted a randomized controlled trial to estimate the effect of Fusion Reading on struggling readers in grades 6 through 10. Students in the intervention condition received the Fusion Reading intervention as a supplemental reading intervention in the 2010-11 school year, whereas students in the control condition engaged in nonliteracy, "business-as-usual" activities. After one year of implementation of a two year intervention, the authors learned that when vocabulary, paraphrasing and word study strategies are explicitly taught by following a specific instructional routine supported by motivation strategies (e.g., setting goals and reading text relevant for the age group), word reading outcomes will significantly improve compared to control middle and high school students. Future research is needed to fully understand whether the intended two year intervention will improve struggling adolescent's reading comprehension outcomes. Appended are: (1) References; and (2) Tables and Figures. (Contains 2 figures and 5 tables.)

American Institutes for Research (AIR) conducted an evaluation of the effect on struggling readers of implementing the READ 180 reading intervention in five participating schools in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) under a Striving Readers grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The evaluation used an experimental design in order to produce a rigorous estimate of the impact of the READ 180 intervention on measures of reading achievement for struggling students. The evaluation also explored implementation fidelity and the contexts and conditions of implementation that may extend or limit the intervention's effects. To measure program impact on students' academic performance in reading, AIR analyzed student achievement data collected from the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) benchmark assessment. AIR also administered a student survey to assess the impact on student engagement and self-efficacy for reading. This report asked the following research questions: (1) Does the READ 180 reading intervention improve students' academic performance in reading?; (2) With what fidelity did the program implement the professional development model and what factors mediated the level of implementation?; and (3) With what fidelity did classroom intervention teachers implement READ 180 and what factors mediated the level of implementation?

This report presents the results of an experiment conducted in Alabama beginning in the 2006/07 school year, to determine the effectiveness of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI), which aims to improve mathematics and science achievement in the state's K-12 schools. This study is the first randomized controlled trial testing the effectiveness of AMSTI in improving mathematics problem solving and science achievement in upper-elementary and middle schools. AMSTI is an initiative specific to Alabama and was developed and supported through state resources. An important finding is the positive and statistically significant effect of AMSTI on mathematics achievement as measured by the SAT 10 mathematics problem solving assessment administered by the state to students in grades 4-8. After one year in the program, student mathematics scores were higher than those of a control group that did not receive AMSTI by 0.05 standard deviation, equivalent to 2 percentile points. Nine of the 10 sensitivity analyses yielded effect estimates that were statistically significant at the 0.025 level, consistent with the main finding. The estimated effect of AMSTI on science achievement measured after one year was not statistically significant. Based on the SAT 10 science test administered by the state to students in grades 5 and 7, no difference between AMSTI and control schools could be discerned after one year. Changes in classroom instructional strategies, especially an emphasis on more active-learning strategies, are important to the AMSTI theory of action. Therefore, a secondary investigation of classroom practices was conducted, based on data from survey responses from teachers. For both mathematics and science, statistically significant differences were found between AMSTI and control teachers in the average reported time spent using the strategies. The effect of AMSTI on these instructional strategies was 0.47 standard deviation in mathematics and 0.32 standard deviation in science. Two years of AMSTI appeared to have a positive and statistically significant effect on achievement in mathematics problem solving, compared to no AMSTI. Two years of AMSTI appeared to have a positive and statistically significant effect on achievement in science. AMSTI appeared to have a positive and statistically significant effect on reading achievement as measured by the SAT 10 test of reading administered by the state to students in grades 4-8. AMSTI did not appear to have a statistically significant effect on teacher-reported content knowledge in mathematics or science after one year. AMSTI did not appear to have statistically significant differential effects on student achievement in mathematics problem solving or science based on racial/ethnic minority status, enrollment in the free or reduced-price lunch program, gender, or pretest level. Appended are: (1) Explanation of primary and secondary confirmatory outcome measures; (2) Explanation of exploratory research questions; (3) Selection and random assignment of schools; (4) Statistical power analysis; (5) Data collection procedures and timeline; (6) Description of program implementation data collected but not used in report; (7) Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) teacher survey #3; (8) Data cleaning and data file construction; (9) Attrition through study stages for samples used in the confirmatory analysis; (10) Description of degree rank; (11) Equivalence of Year 1 baseline and analyzed samples for confirmatory student-level and classroom practice outcomes; (12) Internal consistency and validity of active learning measures; (13) Number of students and teachers in schools in analytic samples used to analyze Year 1 confirmatory questions; (14) Attrition through study stages for samples used in Year 1 exploratory analysis; (15) Tests of equivalence for baseline and analytic samples for Year 1 exploratory outcomes; (16) Statistical power analyses for moderator analyses; (17) Derivation and motivation of the Bell-Bradley estimator when measuring estimated two-year effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI); (18) Attrition through study stages for samples contributing to estimation of two-year effects; (19) Examination of equivalence in baseline and analytic samples used in the estimation of two-year effects; (20) Estimation model for two-year effects of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI); (21) Topics and instructional methods used at the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) summer institute; (22) Parameter estimates on probability scale for odds-ratio tests of differences between Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) and control conditions in Year 1 (associated with summer professional development and in-school support outcomes); (23) Descriptive statistics for variables that change to a binary scale used in the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) and control conditions in Year 1; (24) Comparison of assumed parameter values and observed sample statistics for statistical power analysis after one year; (25) Parameter estimates for Stanford Achievement Test Tenth Edition (SAT 10) mathematics problem solving after one year; (26) Parameter estimates for Stanford Achievement Test Tenth Edition (SAT 10) science after one year; (27) Parameter estimates for active learning in mathematics after one year; (28) Parameter estimates for active learning in science after one year; (29) Sensitivity analyses of effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on Stanford Achievement Test Tenth Edition (SAT 10) mathematics problem solving achievement after one year; (30) Sensitivity analyses of effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on Stanford Achievement Test Tenth Edition (SAT 10) science achievement after one year; (31) Sensitivity analyses of effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on active learning instructional strategies in mathematics classrooms after one year; (32) Sensitivity analyses of effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on active learning instructional strategies in science classrooms after one year; (33) Tests for violations of factors associated with assumption of equal first year effects on students in Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) and control schools; (34) Post hoc adjustment to standard error for estimate of two-year effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on mathematics achievement after two years; (35) Parameter estimates for effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) after two years; (36) Parameter estimates for effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on student reading achievement after one year; (37) Parameter estimates for teacher content and student engagement after one year; (38) Estimates of effects for terms involving the indicator of treatment status in the analysis of the moderating effect of the three-level pretest variable; (39) Parameter estimates for the analysis of the moderating effect of racial/ethnic minority status on the impact of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on reading after one year; (40) Parameter estimates for analysis of average effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on reading by racial/ethnic minority students after one year; and (41) Parameter estimates for effect of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) on reading for White students after one year. (Contains 26 figures, 136 tables, 1 box and 130 footnotes.)

Reading comprehension is a challenge for K-12 learners and adults. Nonfiction texts, such as expository texts that inform and explain, are particularly challenging and vital for students' understanding because of their frequent use in formal schooling (e.g., textbooks) as well as everyday life (e.g., newspapers, magazines, and medical information). The structure strategy is explicit instruction about how to strategically use knowledge about text structures for encoding and retrieval of information from nonfiction and has consistently shown significant improvements in reading comprehension. We present the delivery of the structure strategy using a web-based intelligent tutoring system (ITSS) that has the potential to offer consistent modeling, practice tasks, assessment, and feedback to the learner. Finally, we report on statistically significant findings from a large scale randomized controlled efficacy trial with rural and suburban 4th-grade students using ITSS.

The Louisiana Striving Readers evaluation assessed the implementation and effectiveness of the Voyager "Passport Reading Journeys" (PRJ), a widely used supplemental literacy intervention for struggling adolescent readers that reflects the research-based practices recommended by the National Reading Panel (2000) and other more recent syntheses (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004; Edmonds, et al., 2009; Kamil, et al., 2008; Scammacca et al., 2007; Torgesen et al., 2007). To date, PRJ has been adopted in 45 states across the country in almost 470 districts and over 2,200 schools, and has served over 268,000 students. PRJ offers four levels of instruction appropriate for middle and high school students. The PRJ curriculum uses direct, explicit instruction in reading comprehension, vocabulary, and word study for adolescents who struggle with reading using age-appropriate fiction and non-fiction texts. The Louisiana Striving Readers Program, funded by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, targeted over 1,200 struggling readers in grades 6-7 from ten middle schools across the state of Louisiana. The grant required a rigorous, independent experimental evaluation, conducted by SEDL, addressing fidelity of program implementation and program impacts on student motivation and reading achievement. The study reported here had two specific aims: (1) determine the fidelity of implementation, or the extent to which the program was delivered as the grant indicated it should be implemented; and (2) determine the impacts of PRJ on student reading and other related outcomes (i.e., student motivation and engagement in reading) and how the effects may have varied by student subgroups. This report details the intervention, the implementation study design and results, and the impact study design and results.

This study investigates whether a curriculum supplement organized as a sequence of teacher-led literacy activities using digital content from public educational television programs can improve early literacy outcomes of low-income preschoolers. The study sample was 436 children in 80 preschool classrooms in California and New York. Preschool teachers were randomly assigned to implement either a 10-week media-rich early literacy intervention that employed clips from "Sesame Street", "Between the Lions", and "SuperWhy!" or to a comparison condition. The media-rich literacy supplement had positive impacts (+0.20 less than or equal to d less than or equal to +0.55) on children's ability to recognize letters, sounds of letters and initial sounds of words, and children's concepts of story and print. The study findings show the potential for incorporating literacy content from public media programming into curriculum supplements supported by professional development to impact early literacy outcomes of low-income children. (Contains 4 tables.)

To date, there have been few causally interpretable evaluations of the impacts of preschool curricula on the skills of children at-risk for academic difficulties, and even fewer studies have demonstrated statistically significant or educationally meaningful effects. In this cluster-randomized study, we evaluated the impacts of a literacy-focused preschool curriculum and two types of professional development on the emergent literacy skills of preschool children at-risk for educational difficulties. Forty-eight preschools were randomly assigned to a business-as-usual control, a literacy-focused curriculum with workshop-only professional development, or a literacy-focused curriculum with workshop plus in-class mentoring professional development conditions. An ethnically diverse group of 739 preschool children was assessed on language and literacy outcomes. Results revealed significant and moderate effects for the curriculum and small, mostly nonsignificant, effects of professional development across child outcomes and classroom measures.

The purpose of this study was to examine the hypothesis that helping preschoolers learn words through categorization may enhance their ability to retain words and their conceptual properties, acting as a bootstrap for self-learning. We examined this hypothesis by investigating the effects of the World of Words instructional program, a supplemental intervention for children in preschool designed to teach word knowledge and conceptual development through taxonomic categorization and embedded multimedia. Participants in the study included 3- and 4-year-old children from 28 Head Start classrooms in 12 schools, randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Children were assessed on word knowledge, expressive language, conceptual knowledge, and categories and properties of concepts in a yearlong intervention. Results indicated that children receiving the WOW treatment consistently outperformed their control counterparts; further, treatment children were able to use categories to identify the meaning of novel words. Gains in word and categorical knowledge were sustained six months later for those children who remained in Head Start. These results suggest that a program targeted to learning words within taxonomic categories may act as a bootstrap for self-learning and inference generation. (Contains 2 notes, 10 tables, and 1 figure.)

This study reports Year 1 findings from a multisite cluster randomized controlled trial of a cognitive strategies approach to teaching text-based analytical writing for mainstreamed Latino English language learners (ELLs) in 9 middle schools and 6 high schools. There were 103 English teachers stratified by school and grade and then randomly assigned to the Pathway Project professional development intervention or control group. The Pathway Project trains teachers to use a pretest on-demand writing assessment to improve text-based analytical writing instruction for mainstreamed Latino ELLs who are able to participate in regular English classes. The intervention draws on well-documented instructional frameworks for teaching mainstreamed ELLs. Such frameworks emphasize the merits of a cognitive strategies approach that supports these learners' English language development. Pathway teachers participated in 46 hrs of training and learned how to apply cognitive strategies by using an on-demand writing assessment to help students understand, interpret, and write analytical essays about literature. Multilevel models revealed significant effects on an on-demand writing assessment (d = 0.35) and the California Standards Test in English language arts (d = 0.07). (Contains 1 figure, 7 tables and 4 footnotes.)

Too many children fail to learn how to read proficiently with serious consequences for their overall well-being and long-term success in school. This may be because providing effective instruction is more complex than many of the current models of reading instruction portray; there are Child Characteristic x Instruction (CXI) interactions. Here we present efficacy results for a randomized control field trial of the Individualizing Student Instruction (ISI) intervention, which relies on dynamic system forecasting intervention models to recommend amounts of reading instruction for each student, taking into account CXI interactions that consider his or her vocabulary and reading skills. The study, conducted in seven schools with 25 teachers and 396 first graders, revealed that students in the ISI intervention classrooms demonstrated significantly greater reading skill gains by spring than did students in control classrooms. Plus, they were more likely to receive differentiated reading instruction based on CXI interaction guided recommended amounts than were students in control classrooms. The precision with which students received the recommended amounts of each type of literacy instruction, the distance from recommendation, also predicted reading outcomes. (Contains 7 figures and 6 tables.)

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), just over 70 percent of students nationally arrive in high school with reading skills that are below "proficient"--defined as demonstrating competency over challenging subject matter. Of these students, nearly half do not exhibit even partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental to proficient work at grade level. These limitations in literacy skills are a major source of course failure, high school dropout, and poor performance in postsecondary education. While research is beginning to emerge about the special needs of striving adolescent readers, very little is known about effective interventions aimed at addressing these needs. To help fill this gap and to provide evidence-based guidance to practitioners, the U.S. Department of Education initiated the Enhanced Reading Opportunities (ERO) study--a demonstration and rigorous evaluation of supplemental literacy programs targeted to ninth-grade students whose reading skills are at least two years below grade level. As part of this demonstration, 34 high schools from 10 school districts implemented one of two reading interventions: Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy (RAAL), designed by WestEd, and Xtreme Reading, designed by the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. These programs were implemented in the study schools for two school years. The U.S. Department of Education's (ED) Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) funded the implementation of these programs, and its Institute of Education Sciences (IES) was responsible for oversight of the evaluation. MDRC--a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization--conducted the evaluation in partnership with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Survey Research Management (SRM). The goal of the reading interventions--which consist of a year-long course that replaces a ninth-grade elective class--is to help striving adolescent readers develop the strategies and routines used by proficient readers, thereby improving their reading skills and ultimately, their academic performance in high school. The first two reports for the study evaluated the programs' impact on the two most proximal outcomes targeted by the interventions--students' reading skills and their reading behaviors at the end of ninth grade. This report--which is the final of three reports for this evaluation--examines the impact of the ERO programs on the more general outcomes that the programs hope to affect--students' academic performance in high school (grade point average [GPA], credit accumulation, and state test scores) as well as students' behavioral outcomes (attendance and disciplinary infractions). These academic and behavioral outcomes are examined during the year in which they were enrolled in the ERO programs (ninth grade), as well as the following school year (tenth grade for most students). Appendices include: (1) The ERO Programs and the ERO Teachers; (2) ERO Student Survey Measures; (3) ERO Implementation Fidelity; (4) State Tests Included in the ERO Study; (5) Response Analysis and Baseline Comparison Tables; (6) Technical Notes for Impact Findings; (7) Statistical Power and Minimum Detectable Effect Size; (8) Supplementary Impact Findings; (9) Baseline and Impact Findings, by Cohort; (10) The Association Between Reading Outcomes and Academic Performance in High School; (11) Variation in Impacts Across Sites and Cohorts; (12) Program Costs; and (13) Poststudy Adolescent Literacy Programming in the ERO Schools: Methodology and Additional Findings. (Contains 97 tables, 23 figures, 2 boxes, and 185 footnotes.) [This paper was written with Edmond Wong. For the first-year report, see ED499778. For the second report, see ED503380.]

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), just over 70 percent of students nationally arrive in high school with reading skills that are below "proficient"--defined as demonstrating competency over challenging subject matter. Of these students, nearly half do not exhibit even partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental to proficient work at grade level. These limitations in literacy skills are a major source of course failure, high school dropout, and poor performance in postsecondary education. While research is beginning to emerge about the special needs of striving adolescent readers, very little is known about effective interventions aimed at addressing these needs. To help fill this gap and to provide evidence-based guidance to practitioners, the U.S. Department of Education initiated the Enhanced Reading Opportunities (ERO) study--a demonstration and rigorous evaluation of supplemental literacy programs targeted to ninth-grade students whose reading skills are at least two years below grade level. As part of this demonstration, 34 high schools from 10 school districts implemented one of two reading interventions: Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy (RAAL), designed by WestEd, and Xtreme Reading, designed by the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. These programs were implemented in the study schools for two school years. The U.S. Department of Education's (ED) Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) funded the implementation of these programs, and its Institute of Education Sciences (IES) was responsible for oversight of the evaluation. MDRC--a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization--conducted the evaluation in partnership with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Survey Research Management (SRM). The goal of the reading interventions--which consist of a year-long course that replaces a ninth-grade elective class--is to help striving adolescent readers develop the strategies and routines used by proficient readers, thereby improving their reading skills and ultimately, their academic performance in high school. The first two reports for the study evaluated the programs' impact on the two most proximal outcomes targeted by the interventions--students' reading skills and their reading behaviors at the end of ninth grade. This report--which is the final of three reports for this evaluation--examines the impact of the ERO programs on the more general outcomes that the programs hope to affect--students' academic performance in high school (grade point average [GPA], credit accumulation, and state test scores) as well as students' behavioral outcomes (attendance and disciplinary infractions). These academic and behavioral outcomes are examined during the year in which they were enrolled in the ERO programs (ninth grade), as well as the following school year (tenth grade for most students). Appendices include: (1) The ERO Programs and the ERO Teachers; (2) ERO Student Survey Measures; (3) ERO Implementation Fidelity; (4) State Tests Included in the ERO Study; (5) Response Analysis and Baseline Comparison Tables; (6) Technical Notes for Impact Findings; (7) Statistical Power and Minimum Detectable Effect Size; (8) Supplementary Impact Findings; (9) Baseline and Impact Findings, by Cohort; (10) The Association Between Reading Outcomes and Academic Performance in High School; (11) Variation in Impacts Across Sites and Cohorts; (12) Program Costs; and (13) Poststudy Adolescent Literacy Programming in the ERO Schools: Methodology and Additional Findings. (Contains 97 tables, 23 figures, 2 boxes, and 185 footnotes.) [This paper was written with Edmond Wong. For the first-year report, see ED499778. For the second report, see ED503380.]

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), just over 70 percent of students nationally arrive in high school with reading skills that are below "proficient"--defined as demonstrating competency over challenging subject matter. Of these students, nearly half do not exhibit even partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental to proficient work at grade level. These limitations in literacy skills are a major source of course failure, high school dropout, and poor performance in postsecondary education. While research is beginning to emerge about the special needs of striving adolescent readers, very little is known about effective interventions aimed at addressing these needs. To help fill this gap and to provide evidence-based guidance to practitioners, the U.S. Department of Education initiated the Enhanced Reading Opportunities (ERO) study--a demonstration and rigorous evaluation of supplemental literacy programs targeted to ninth-grade students whose reading skills are at least two years below grade level. As part of this demonstration, 34 high schools from 10 school districts implemented one of two reading interventions: Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy (RAAL), designed by WestEd, and Xtreme Reading, designed by the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. These programs were implemented in the study schools for two school years. The U.S. Department of Education's (ED) Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) funded the implementation of these programs, and its Institute of Education Sciences (IES) was responsible for oversight of the evaluation. MDRC--a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization--conducted the evaluation in partnership with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Survey Research Management (SRM). The goal of the reading interventions--which consist of a year-long course that replaces a ninth-grade elective class--is to help striving adolescent readers develop the strategies and routines used by proficient readers, thereby improving their reading skills and ultimately, their academic performance in high school. The first two reports for the study evaluated the programs' impact on the two most proximal outcomes targeted by the interventions--students' reading skills and their reading behaviors at the end of ninth grade. This report--which is the final of three reports for this evaluation--examines the impact of the ERO programs on the more general outcomes that the programs hope to affect--students' academic performance in high school (grade point average [GPA], credit accumulation, and state test scores) as well as students' behavioral outcomes (attendance and disciplinary infractions). These academic and behavioral outcomes are examined during the year in which they were enrolled in the ERO programs (ninth grade), as well as the following school year (tenth grade for most students). Appendices include: (1) The ERO Programs and the ERO Teachers; (2) ERO Student Survey Measures; (3) ERO Implementation Fidelity; (4) State Tests Included in the ERO Study; (5) Response Analysis and Baseline Comparison Tables; (6) Technical Notes for Impact Findings; (7) Statistical Power and Minimum Detectable Effect Size; (8) Supplementary Impact Findings; (9) Baseline and Impact Findings, by Cohort; (10) The Association Between Reading Outcomes and Academic Performance in High School; (11) Variation in Impacts Across Sites and Cohorts; (12) Program Costs; and (13) Poststudy Adolescent Literacy Programming in the ERO Schools: Methodology and Additional Findings. (Contains 97 tables, 23 figures, 2 boxes, and 185 footnotes.) [This paper was written with Edmond Wong. For the first-year report, see ED499778. For the second report, see ED503380.]

This report addresses the following four questions by reporting on the impacts of Head Start on children and families during the children's preschool, kindergarten, and 1st grade years: (1) What difference does Head Start make to key outcomes of development and learning (and in particular, the multiple domains of school readiness) for low-income children? (2) What difference does Head Start make to parental practices that contribute to children's school readiness? (3) Under what circumstances does Head Start achieve the greatest impact? What works for which children? (4) What Head Start services are most related to impact? The Head Start Impact Study was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 84 grantee/delegate agencies and included nearly 5,000 newly entering, eligible 3- and 4-year-old children who were randomly assigned to either: (1) a Head Start group that had access to Head Start program services or (2) a control group that did not have access to Head Start, but could enroll in other early childhood programs or non-Head Start services selected by their parents. The study was designed to separately examine two cohorts of children, newly entering 3-and 4-year-olds. This design reflects the hypothesis that different program impacts may be associated with different age of entry into Head Start. Differential impacts are of particular interest in light of a trend of increased enrollment of the 3-year-olds in some grantee/delegate agencies presumably due to the growing availability of preschool options for 4-year-olds. Consequently, the study included two separate samples: a newly entering 3-year-old group (to be studied through two years of Head Start participation i.e., Head Start year and age 4 year, kindergarten and 1st grade), and a newly entering 4-year-old group (to be studied through one year of Head Start participation, kindergarten and 1st grade). The study showed that the two age cohorts varied in demographic characteristics, making it even more appropriate to examine them separately. The racial/ethnic characteristics of newly entering children in the 3-year-old cohort were substantially different from the characteristics of children in the newly entering 4-year-old cohort. While the newly entering 3-year-olds were relatively evenly distributed between Black children and Hispanic children (Black children 32.8%, Hispanic children 37.4%, and White/other children 29.8%), about half of newly entering 4-year-olds were Hispanic children (Black children 17.5%, Hispanic children 51.6%, and White/other children 30.8%). The ethnic difference is also reflected in the age-group differences in child and parent language. This report presents the findings from the preschool years through children's 1st grade experience. This document consists of the Executive Summary and nine chapters. Chapter 1 presents the study background, including a literature review of related Head Start research and the study purpose and objectives. Chapter 2 provides details about the study design and implementation. It discusses the experimental design, sample selection prior to random assignment, data collection, and data analysis. To provide a context in which to understand the impact findings, Chapter 3 examines the impact of Head Start on the services and child care settings that children experience prior to starting school. It also provides the impact of Head Start on the educational and child care settings, setting characteristics, and services that children experience during kindergarten and 1st grade. Chapters 4 through 7 present the impact of Head Start on children's outcomes and parenting practices for the years before school and then for kindergarten and 1st grade. Chapter 4 presents the impact of Head Start on children's cognitive development, Chapter 5 presents the impact of Head Start on children's social-emotional development, Chapter 6 presents the impact of Head Start on children's health status and access to health services, and Chapter 7 presents the impact of Head Start on parenting practices in the areas of educational activities, discipline practices, and school involvement. Chapter 8 examines variation in impacts by child characteristics, parent and family characteristics, and community characteristics. Chapter 9 provides an overall summary of the findings, implications for the Head Start Program, and unanswered questions. Appendices in this volume include the Head Start Impact Study legislation, a list of the official Head Start Impact Study Advisory Committee members, the language decision form used to determine the language in which the child was assessed, and data tables that elaborate on the findings presented in the volume (e.g., Impact on Treated (IOT) findings). The findings from a sample of programs in Puerto Rico are also provided in an appendix. Programs in Puerto Rico were included in the study with the intent that data on children in these programs would be analyzed along with the data on children in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, once children reached school-age. (Contains 1 figure, 117 footnotes, and 114 exhibits.) [The ERIC version of this document contains the following supplementary materials: Head Start Impact Study Main Impact Tables, 2003 through 2006; and Head Start Impact Study Subgroup Impact Tables, 2003 through 2006. For the "Head Start Impact Study Technical Report," see ED507846. For the "Head Start Impact Study Final Report. Executive Summary," see ED507847.]

Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) is a universal, schoolwide prevention strategy that is currently implemented in over 9,000 schools across the nation to reduce disruptive behavior problems through the application of behavioral, social learning, and organizational behavioral principles. SWPBIS aims to alter school environments by creating improved systems and procedures that promote positive change in student behavior by targeting staff behaviors. This study uses data from a 5-year longitudinal randomized controlled effectiveness trial of SWPBIS conducted in 37 elementary schools to examine the impact of training in SWPBIS on implementation fidelity as well as student suspensions, office discipline referrals, and academic achievement. School-level longitudinal analyses indicated that the schools trained in SWPBIS implemented the model with high fidelity and experienced significant reductions in student suspensions and office discipline referrals. (Contains 1 table and 5 figures.)

This report summarizes evaluation results for an efficacy study of the Leveled Literacy Intervention system (LLI) implemented in Tift County Schools (TCS) in Georgia and the Enlarged City School District of Middletown (ECSDM) in New York during the 2009-2010 school year. Developed by Fountas & Pinnell (2009) and published by Heinemann, LLI is a short-term, small-group, supplemental literacy intervention system designed for students in kindergarten through second grade (K-2) who struggle with literacy. The goal of LLI is to provide intensive support to help these early learners quickly achieve grade-level competency. Both school districts evaluated in this study adopted the targeted, small-group implementation model of LLI in their schools with support from Heinemann consultants providing LLI professional development. This report focuses on the implementation and impact of this model during the first full school year of the system in these schools. The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to determine the efficacy of the Leveled Literacy Intervention system (LLI) in increasing reading achievement for K-2 students; (2) to examine the implementation fidelity of LLI; and (3) to determine perceptions of the LLI system according to relevant stakeholders. This study focused on two U.S. school districts and comprised 427 K-2 students who were matched demographically and randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. This evaluation used a mixed-methods design to address the following key research questions: (1) What progress in literacy do students who receive LLI make compared to students who receive only regular classroom literacy instruction? (2) Was LLI implemented with fidelity to the developers' model? and (3) What were LLI teachers' perceptions of LLI and its impact on their students' literacy? Altogether, the results from this evaluation allow us to conclude that the LLI system positively impacts students' literacy skills. These results also suggest that continued implementation of LLI would be beneficial in both Tift County Schools and the Enlarged City School District of Middletown. From this evaluation, CREP proposes several recommendations. (Contains 34 tables, 8 footnotes, and 1 figure.) [This study was supported by funding from Heinemann Publishing.]

State education departments, in discussions with Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast, identified low reading achievement as a critical issue for their students and expressed an interest in identifying effective strategies to promote the foundational skills in young students that might improve reading achievement. The Mississippi State Department of Education has focused specifically on interventions that might enhance students' vocabulary knowledge. Kindergarten PAVEd for Success (K-PAVE) was selected to be tested in Mississippi for three reasons. First, there were only a small number of vocabulary interventions appropriate for this age group to be considered. Second, among these, PAVE--the preschool version of the intervention--was the only one for which an impact study had been completed that provided some evidence of effects. Third, K-PAVE was the only curriculum that had developed teacher training materials and a training protocol, which meant that it could be implemented with sufficient fidelity across a variety of districts and school settings. The primary research question for the study addressed the impact of K-PAVE on kindergarten students' expressive vocabulary. Secondary research questions addressed the impacts on kindergarten students' academic knowledge and listening comprehension. Although the study was concerned primarily with the impacts of K-PAVE on students, impacts on intermediate classroom instruction outcomes were also assessed to provide context for understanding potential impacts on students. The study addressed research questions about impacts on classroom instruction in vocabulary and comprehension support, instructional support, and emotional support. Finally, the study examined whether the introduction of K-PAVE had the unintended consequence of reducing the time spent on areas of literacy instruction other than vocabulary and comprehension (such as phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, print concepts, and decoding). The study found that kindergarten students in schools using K-PAVE as a supplement to the regular literacy instruction performed better than kindergarten students in control schools on the Expressive Vocabulary Test-2 administered at the end of the school year. The study also found that kindergarten students in K-PAVE schools performed better than students in control schools on the measure of academic knowledge administered at the end of the year. K-PAVE caused a positive and statistically significant impact on one of the three kindergarten classroom instructional practices examined: vocabulary and comprehension support, which includes introducing vocabulary words during read-alouds, introducing vocabulary words throughout the school day, asking higher order questions during read-alouds, and providing comprehension support during book read-alouds. Appendices include: (1) Mississippi Counties with Study Schools, by County; (2) Statistical Power Analysis; (3) Random Assignment; (4) Recruitment and Random Selection of the Student Sample; (5) Comparison of Students Missing and Not Missing Baseline Assessment; (6) Classroom Observation Measures for Impact Evaluation; (7) Teacher Survey; (8) K-PAVE Fidelity Observer Handbook and Training Fidelity Checklist; (9) Data Collection Procedures; (10) Data Quality Assurance Procedures; (11) Model Specifications; (12) Flowchart Illustrating Sample Attrition from Data Collection; (13) Missing Data Imputation; (14) Sensitivity Analyses; (15) School, Teacher, and Student Covariates; (16) List of K-PAVE Materials Provided to Teachers; (17) Sample Weekly Unit from K-PAVE Program; (18) List of the 240 K-PAVE Target Words; (19) K-PAVE Teacher Training Agenda; (20) K-PAVE Teacher Phone Follow-Up Agenda; (21) Sample Means and Standard Deviations for Student and Classroom Outcome Measures, by Intervention Status; (22) Checking Model Assumptions; and (23) Translating Impacts on Students into Age-Equivalent Differences in Posttest Outcomes. (Contains 53 tables, 16 figures, 1 map, 3 boxes, and 86 footnotes

Connecticut's interdistrict magnet schools offer a model of choice-based desegregation that appears to satisfy current legal constraints. This study presents evidence that interdistrict magnet schools have provided students from Connecticut's central cities access to less racially and economically isolated educational environments and estimates the impact of attending a magnet school on student achievement. To address potential selection biases, the analyses exploit the random assignment that results from lottery-based admissions for a small set of schools, as well as value-added and fixed-effect estimators that rely on pre-magnet school measures of student achievement to obtain effect estimates for a broader set of interdistrict magnet schools. Results indicate that attendance at an interdistrict magnet high school has positive effects on the math and reading achievement of central city students and that interdistrict magnet middle schools have positive effects on reading achievement. (Contains 20 notes, 8 tables, and 1 figure.)

Successful implementation of evidence-based educational practices at scale is of great importance but has presented significant challenges. In this article, the authors address the following questions: How does the level of on-site technical assistance affect student outcomes? Do teachers' fidelity of treatment implementation and their perceptions of school climate mediate effects on student performance? Using a randomized control trial at scale, the authors examine Kindergarten Peer Assisted Learning Strategies, which previously has been shown to be effective in increasing student reading achievement. Analyzing data from 2 years and three sites, the analyses show that the level of on-site technical support has significant effects on reading achievement gains, are robust across multiple sites, and are mediated by fidelity of implementation within teachers' classrooms. (Contains 2 figures and 4 tables.)

In this article, the authors report achievement outcomes of a multisite cluster randomized field trial of Open Court Reading 2005 (OCR), a K-6 literacy curriculum published by SRA/McGraw-Hill. The participants are 49 first-grade through fifth-grade classrooms from predominantly minority and poor contexts across the nation. Blocking by grade level within schools, the trial includes 27 classrooms receiving the OCR curricular materials and professional development and 22 "business-as-usual" control classrooms. Multilevel analyses of classroom-level effects of assignment to OCR reveal statistically significant treatment effects on all three of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, 5th edition, Terra Nova literacy posttests. The OCR effect sizes are d = 0.16 for the Reading Composite, d = 0.19 for Vocabulary, and d = 0.12 for Reading Comprehension. These effects achieved across 27 classrooms and 5 schools demonstrate the potential for replicating improved literacy outcomes through the scale-up of OCR. (Contains 4 tables and 1 note.)

Using a cluster randomization design, schools were randomly assigned to implement Success for All, a comprehensive reading reform model, or control methods. This article reports final literacy outcomes for a 3-year longitudinal sample of children who participated in the treatment or control condition from kindergarten through second grade and a combined longitudinal and in-mover student sample, both of which were nested within 35 schools. Hierarchical linear model analyses of all three outcomes for both samples revealed statistically significant school-level effects of treatment assignment as large as one third of a standard deviation. The results correspond with the Success for All program theory, which emphasizes both comprehensive school-level reform and targeted student-level achievement effects through a multi-year sequencing of literacy instruction. (Contains 5 tables.)

This paper reports on a randomized experiment to study the impact of an alternative teacher preparation program, Teach for America (TFA), on student achievement and other outcomes. We found that TFA teachers had a positive impact on math achievement and no impact on reading achievement. The size of the impact on math scores was about 15 percent of a standard deviation, equivalent to about one month of instruction. The general conclusions did not differ substantially for subgroups of teachers, including novice teachers, or for subgroups of students. We found no impacts on other student outcomes such as attendance, promotion, or disciplinary incidents, but TFA teachers were more likely to report problems with student behavior than were their peers. The findings contradict claims that such programs allowing teachers to bypass the traditional route to the classroom harm students.

Teach For America (TFA) was founded in 1989 to address the educational inequities facing children in low-income communities across the United States by expanding the pool of teacher candidates available to the schools those children attend. TFA recruits seniors and recent graduates from colleges around the country, people who are willing to commit to teach for a minimum of two years in low-income schools. TFA focuses its recruitment on people with strong academic records and leadership capabilities, whether or not they have planned to teach or have taken education courses. TFA is particularly interested in candidates that have the potential to be effective in the classroom but in the absence of TFA would not consider a teaching career. Consequently, most TFA recruits do not have education-related majors in college and therefore have not received the same training that traditional teachers are expected to have. After an executive summary and introduction, this discussion paper addresses the following: (1) How TFA Works; (2) Study Design; (3) Who Teaches in the Schools Where TFA Places Teachers?; (4) What Does Our Sample of Students Look Like?; (5) Were TFA Teachers Effective in the Classroom?; and (6) Did TFA Have an Impact on Other Student Outcomes? Primary findings from the study include: from the perspective of a community or a school faced with the opportunity to hire TFA teachers, TFA offers an appealing pool of candidates; from the perspective of TFA and its funders, the organization is making progress toward its primary mission of reducing inequities in education--it supplies low-income schools with academically talented teachers who contribute positively to the academic achievement of their students; and from the perspective of policymakers who are trying to improve the educational opportunities of children in poor communities, many of the control teachers in the study were not certified or did not have formal pre-service training, highlighting the need for programs or policies that offer the potential of attracting good teachers to schools in the most disadvantaged communities--the findings show that TFA is one such program. Appended are: (1) Supplementary Tables; and (2) Estimation Approach. (Contains 17 tables and 6 figures.)

District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to examine the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The lessons address state standards and cover 20 prefixes and suffixes. Thirty-nine schools participated in the study, with 92 English language arts (ELA) teachers in high-poverty schools randomly assigned within schools either to use WKI or to continue to use their standard ELA curriculum. Classroom observations revealed that WKI was implemented as intended. WKI had a positive effect, equivalent to an increase of 9 percentile points, on students' ability to correctly extract and spell a base word from a derived word, one of the skills explicitly taught by WKI. WKI had no effect on two other related reading skills that were not directly taught by WKI (students' ability to select a nonword that best fits the grammatical context of a sentence or to use knowledge of word parts to infer meaning of new words) or on students' vocabulary or reading scores. These findings suggest that, although students learned what they were explicitly taught, the transferability to related but not directly taught skills might require more intense or longer duration instruction or additional professional development for teachers. [For the study snapshot, see ED611684. For the appendix, see ED611685.]

This study evaluated the efficacy of the Word Learning Strategies (WLS) supplementary program to improve elementary students' vocabulary skills and reading comprehension. The study used a multi-site cluster randomized, experimental design, which randomly assigned 92 4th grade classrooms (n=2558 students) from two cohorts to a treatment or control group. Results indicated that the program was positively associated with gains in students' vocabulary learning and knowledge as measured by the Word Learning Strategies Test and the VASE Assessment, and in students' reading comprehension as measured by the Gates-MacGrinitie Reading Test, after accounting for differences in baseline measures. The use of the WLS program also led to increases in teachers' awareness of strategies to support their students' vocabulary and reading comprehension. [This paper was published in the Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Toronto, Canada.]

Seventh- and 8th-grade students in a within-teacher randomized control study read from visual-syntactic formatted text for 44 min per week over the course of 1 year. On the annual state assessment, we found small statistically significant improvements on the overall English Language Arts scaled score (ES = 0.05, p < 0.05) and the writing assessment (ES = 0.07, p < 0.01) for the treatment group compared to the control group. We found no interactions between gifted, special education, or English learner classification and treatment status on the effect on overall English Language Arts score, but our categorical and subgroup analyses showed that the use of visual-syntactic text formatting provided a modest benefit to middle school students who were near or at grade level in the prior school year.

A growing body of research points to the ways in which principals influence teachers, classrooms, and, ultimately, student achievement. New Leaders aims to prepare transformational school leaders by partnering with districts and charter schools to offer rigorous, research-based training for aspiring principals. The Aspiring Principals program is New Leaders' signature program and has three core features: selective recruitment and admission, training and endorsement, and support for principals early in their tenure. This report is a follow-up to the 2014 evaluation of New Leaders' Aspiring Principals program. Focusing on the revised program, which was first implemented in 2012, the authors present evidence of the effectiveness of the revised Aspiring Principals program and share lessons that can inform principal-preparation policy and practice. To assess the effect of New Leaders' Aspiring Principals program, researchers analyzed whether schools and students led by graduates of the program outperformed comparison schools and students in the same district, focusing on student achievement and principal retention. They also examined program graduate placement and satisfaction with the Aspiring Principals program. [For the appendixes, see ED605724.]

The three-tiered Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) framework promotes the development of systems and data analysis to guide the selection and implementation of evidence-based practices across multiple tiers. The current study examined the effects of universal (tier 1) or school-wide PBIS (SW-PBIS) in one state's scale-up of this tier of the framework. Annual propensity score weights were generated to examine the longitudinal effects of SW-PBIS from 2006-07 through 2011-12. School-level archival and administrative data outcomes were examined using panel models with an autoregressive structure. The sample included 1,316 elementary, middle, and high schools. Elementary schools trained in SW-PBIS demonstrated statistically significantly lower suspensions during the fourth and fifth study years (i.e., small effect size) and higher reading and math proficiency rates during the first two study years as well as in one and two later years (i.e., small to large effect sizes), respectively. Secondary schools implementing SW-PBIS had statistically significantly lower suspensions and truancy rates during the second study year and higher reading and math proficiency rates during the second and third study years. These findings demonstrate medium effect sizes for all outcomes except suspensions. Given the widespread use of SW-PBIS across nearly 26,000 schools in the U.S., this study has important implications for educational practices and policies. [This paper was published in the "Journal of School Psychology" v73 p41-55 Apr 2019 (ISSN 0022-4405).]

The UPSTART Summer program is a federally funded i3 validation project that uses a computer-based program to maintain and develop the literacy skills of elementary school students in rural Utah during the summer months when school is out of session. Researchers used a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of the program in forestalling literacy learning loss during several summer periods. Students in the treatment group participated in the UPSTART Summer program, in the summer periods after kindergarten, first grade, and/or second grade. A second group of children, who were not enrolled in the program served as a comparison. Statistical matching procedures were used to create separate treatment and comparison analytic samples for each outcome measure that were equivalent on baseline scores and demographic variables (e.g., school, gender, race, language learner status, household income, Title 1 school enrollment, etc.). Standardized literacy assessments of letter knowledge, phonics, and reading fluency were administered prior to program commencement at the end of the academic school year and upon program completion at the beginning of the following school year. Results revealed that the UPSTART Summer program had a significant impact in reducing literacy learning loss in rising first graders on assessments of letter naming fluency, nonsense word fluency (correct letter sounds), and a reading composite score when compared to a matched comparison group. There were no differences in learning loss rates between rising first graders and comparison students on assessments measuring phoneme segmentation fluency or nonsense word reading (whole words read). Additionally, the UPSTART Summer program did not have an impact on literacy learning loss prevention in rising second or third grade students as measured by assessments of nonsense word reading, oral reading fluency, or overall reading composites. Taken together these results suggest that the UPSTART program helps to maintain early literacy skills in the summer months between Kindergarten and first grade.

Research for Action's Year Two evaluation report indicates that most lead teachers demonstrated high fidelity to the key elements of the Blueprint approach in the classroom, though some teachers experienced issues related to differentiating instruction and the simultaneous implementation of Blueprint and Creative Curriculum. The authors found strong evidence of impact on teachers and students: multiple data sources demonstrated that teachers and children in Blueprint centers benefitted from the Blueprint curriculum and professional development. Children in Children's Literacy Initiative (CLI)-served classrooms made 2-3 months of additional progress in vocabulary development compared to children in similar classrooms not supported by CLI. Though less than a quarter of lead teachers in Blueprint classrooms in Spring 2018 received intended amount of training and coaching due to high turnover and variable attendance, most teachers had at least attended the Introduction to Blueprint 3.0 training and received at least one full year's worth of coaching (over 20 hours). This report is comprised of two studies that provide in-depth findings of Year Two Blueprint implementation (resources and activities) and impacts (teacher and student outcomes). Study 1: Blueprint Implementation is a descriptive study of the quality of implementation of Blueprint in 11 Philadelphia pre-K centers. This study also followed up on findings from Year One, including an in-depth exploration of challenges to implementation-- consistent attendance at trainings, finding time for coaching conferences, and coaching amidst high teacher turnover--and CLI strategies to address them. Study 2: Impact of Blueprint on Teachers and Students is a study that employed a mixed-methods quasi-experimental research design, involving 11 centers receiving Blueprint professional development and curriculum and 11 centers serving as a comparison group. [Additional funding for this report was provided by The 25th Century Foundation, The Caroline Alexander Buck Foundation, and The Capital Group Companies.]

The English Language and Literacy Acquisition--Validation (ELLA-V) study was a five-year evaluation of a program that provided professional development, coaching, and curricula that targeted English-as-a-second-language (ESL) instruction for teachers of K-3 English learners (ELs). ELLA-V was implemented in 10 school districts in Texas in the 2013-14 through 2016-17 school years. The project was federally funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund (PR/Award Number U411B120047). Professors at Texas A&M University were the recipients of the grant and developed the professional development, the coaching program, and the curricula. Researchers at the Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) at Johns Hopkins University were contracted to conduct the independent evaluation. The evaluation of ELLA-V was a multi-site cluster randomized trial designed to meet the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) standards for rigorous education research (WWC, 2017). The study used a mixed method design to estimate program impacts on student and teacher outcomes and document the fidelity of implementation and perceived quality of the program. [This report was published at the Center for Research and Reform in Education (ED594703). Principal Investigators were Rafael Lara-Alecio, Beverly Irby, and Fuhui Tong. Cindy Guerrero and Laura Cajiao-Wingenbach were Lead Coordinators.]

The 3-year Pennsylvania Dyslexia Screening and Early Literacy Intervention Pilot Program (Pilot) began in 2015-16 (Year 1) with the kindergarten class of 2015-16 (Cohort 1). In 2016-17 (Year 2), the Pilot was implemented with Cohort 1 students, now in first grade, and a second cohort of kindergarteners (Cohort 2). A third cohort will be added in 2017-18. The Pilot provides two levels of support: (1) a classroom program, which supplements core instruction for all students, with an increased focus on phonemic awareness and multisensory structured language (MSL), and (2) an MSL intervention to provide extra instruction for students identified as needing more support based on early literacy screening in the winter of kindergarten. Both levels of support are meant to affect special education referrals and students' literacy skills, measured by the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Next benchmark assessments (only DIBELS data are available at this time). This report presents key findings from Year 2. The effectiveness of the classroom program was evaluated using a school-level matched design, in which the performance of students in the 21 Pilot schools was compared with the performance of students in 21 matched comparison (Comparison) schools identified through Mahalanobis distance matching. These analyses suggest that both Pilot cohorts (21 schools) outperformed the Comparison sample on some spring 2017 (Year 2) measures (nonsense word fluency for both cohorts and letter naming fluency for Cohort 2). This may be because of improved implementation in Year 2, and is particularly encouraging given the Comparison sample's participation in another literacy initiative, which may result in an underestimation of Pilot program effects compared with typical schools (which may not use universal screening to inform core instruction and identify students to receive supplemental intervention). The effectiveness of the MSL intervention was assessed using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, in which Pilot students eligible for the intervention were compared with similarly performing students in the same schools who were not eligible for the intervention. Although these analyses yielded no positive effects, exploratory analyses suggest that the intervention may have contributed to improved performance for Cohort 1 Pilot intervention students compared to similar Comparison students. Exploratory analyses also found an association between intervention hours and outcomes, suggesting increased dosage might yield stronger intervention effects (most schools did not meet target hours). These findings suggest that the combination of enhanced core instruction and supplemental MSL intervention improve some student outcomes in school settings, warranting further study. The Pilot's final evaluation report will cover the third year of Pilot implementation, allowing comparisons across three cohorts and expanding the Pilot to second grade (Cohort 1), and consider other variables such as special education status. This report includes numerous exhibits to explain implementation, samples, and findings, and includes the following appendices: (1) Study Design; (2) Matching to Establish Comparison Sample; (3) Supplementary Implementation Information; (4) Comparisons of Analysis Samples; (5) Sample Parent Notification and Opt-Out Template Provided by PDE to Pilot Districts; (6) Technical Information.

Supporting the reading comprehension and content knowledge acquisition of English language learners (ELs) requires instructional practices that continue beyond developing the foundational skills of reading. In particular, the challenges ELs face highlight the importance of teaching reading comprehension practices in the middle grades through content acquisition. We conducted a randomized control trial to examine the efficacy of a content acquisition and reading comprehension intervention implemented in eighth-grade social studies classrooms with English language learners. Using a within-teacher design, in which 18 eighth-grade teachers' social studies classes were randomly assigned to treatment or comparison conditions. Teachers taught the same instructional content to treatment and comparison classes, but the treatment classes used instructional practices that included comprehension canopy, essential words, knowledge acquisition, and team-based learning. Students in the treatment group (n = 845) outperformed students in the comparison group (n = 784) on measures of content knowledge acquisition and content reading comprehension but not general reading comprehension. Both ELs and non-ELs who received the treatment outperformed those assigned to the BAU comparison condition on measures of content knowledge acquisition (ES = 0.40) and content-related reading comprehension (ES = 0.20). In addition, the proportion of English language learners in classes moderated outcomes for content knowledge acquisition.

Reading comprehension in the content areas is a challenge for many middle grade students. Text structure-based instruction has yielded positive outcomes in reading comprehension at all grade levels in small and large studies. The text structure strategy delivered via the web, called Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy (ITSS), has proven successful in large-scale studies at 4th and 5th grades and a smaller study at 7th grade. Text structure-based instruction focuses on selection and encoding of strategic memory. This strategic memory proves to be an effective springboard for many comprehension-based activities such as summarizing, inferring, elaborating, and applying. This was the first large-scale randomized controlled efficacy study on the web-based delivery of the text structure strategy to 7th-grade students. 108 classrooms from rural and suburban schools were randomly assigned to ITSS or control and pretests and posttests were administered at the beginning and end of the school year. Multilevel data analyses were conducted on standardized and researcher designed measures of reading comprehension. Results showed that ITSS classrooms outperformed the control classrooms on all measures with the highest effects reported for number of ideas included in the main idea. Results have practical implications for classroom practices.

We study the effectiveness of teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) in Washington State, which has one of the largest populations of National Board-Certified Teachers (NBCTs) in the nation. Based on value-added models in math and reading, we find that NBPTS-certified teachers are about 0.01-0.05 student standard deviations more effective than non-NBCTS with similar levels of experience. Certification effects vary by subject, grade level, and certification type, with greater effects for middle school math certificates. We find mixed evidence that teachers who pass the assessment are more effective than those who fail, but that the underlying NBPTS assessment score predicts student achievement.

Behavioral trajectories during middle childhood are predictive of consequential outcomes later in life (e.g., substance abuse, violence). Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs are designed to promote trajectories that reflect both growth in positive behaviors and inhibited development of negative behaviors. The current study used growth mixture models to examine effects of the "Positive Action" program (PA) on behavioral trajectories of social-emotional and character development (SECD) and misconduct using data from a cluster-randomized trial that involved 14 schools and a sample of predominately low-income, urban youth followed from 3rd through 8th grade. For SECD, findings indicated that PA was similarly effective at improving trajectories within latent classes characterized as "High/declining" and "Low/stable". Favorable program effects were likewise evident to a comparable degree for misconduct across observed latent classes that reflected "Low/rising" and "High/rising" trajectories. These findings suggest that PA and perhaps other school-based universal SEL programs have the potential to yield comparable benefits across subgroups of youth with differing trajectories of positive and negative behaviors, making them promising strategies for achieving the intended goal of school-wide improvements in student outcomes. [This paper was published in "Prevention Science" v18 p214-224 2017.]

This study examined the effects of Reading Recovery on children's motivational levels, and how motivation may contribute to the effect of the intervention on literacy achievement. Prior studies concluded that Reading Recovery was positively associated with increased student motivation levels, but most of those studies were limited methodologically. The achievement and motivation levels before and after the intervention of Reading Recovery students and similarly low-performing first-grade students were compared using structural equation modeling. It was found that Reading Recovery had a 0.31 treatment effect on achievement after controlling for baseline achievement and motivational differences among the treatment and comparison students. Reading Recovery also was associated with greater average levels of posttest motivation, and motivation was found to mediate the treatment-achievement relationship. This study highlights how important it is for early reading interventions to consider the role motivation plays in literacy acquisition.

In 2013-14, the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) launched Achieve3000 as a randomized controlled trial in 16 elementary schools. Achieve3000 is an early literacy program that differentiates non-fiction reading passages based on individual students' Lexile scores. Twoyear results show that Achieve3000 did not have a significant impact on student outcomes. However, both intent-to-treat and treatment-on-treated estimates show that in 2015, the second year of implementation, students in the treatment group outperformed their control-group counterparts by 0.13 standard deviation units (SD) on the year-end Achieve3000 LevelSet Lexile test. This effect size is consistent with mean empirical effect sizes reported by Lipsey et al. (2012). Yet in neither the pooled nor annual results did Achieve3000 significantly impact student performance on additional Lexile outcomes (EOG or DIBELS ORF). Both implementation and impact results for Achieve3000 suggest that the ability of this particular technology-based literacy solution to improve student performance beyond that of a control group fell short of vendor-defined and empirical expectations.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of Achieve3000, a differentiated online literacy curriculum, on students' scores on the California State Test (CST). In the 2011-12 school year, 1,957 students in Chula Vista began using Achieve3000's solutions in 3rd through 8th grade. Using a form of propensity score matching called Inverse Probability-of-Treatment Weighting (IPTW), the researchers assigned weights for the likelihood that students in the non-user comparison group (N = 7,598) could have been in the Achieve3000 treatment group. A Weighted Least Squares (WLS) regression model with IPTW weights estimated the average treatment effect. The researchers found that, overall, the students assigned to Achieve3000 performed statistically significantly higher on the CST, by 2.4 points, than students who were not using these solutions. This suggests the program is effective in improving student learning over conventional classroom activities in the first year of use, however more data is needed to determine the long term impact of usage. Five appendices contain supplemental tables and figures.

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. Prior studies (see Tuttle et al. 2013) have consistently found that attending a KIPP middle school positively affects student achievement, but few have addressed longer-term outcomes and no rigorous research exists on impacts of KIPP schools at levels other than middle school. In this first high-quality study to rigorously examine the impacts of the network of KIPP public charter schools at all elementary and secondary grade levels, Mathematica found that KIPP schools have positive impacts on student achievement, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels. In addition, the study found positive impacts on student achievement for new entrants to the KIPP network in high school. For students continuing from a KIPP middle school, KIPP high schools' impacts on student achievement are not statistically significant, on average (in comparison to students who did not have the option to attend a KIPP high school and instead attended a mix of other non-KIPP charter, private, and traditional public high schools). Among these continuing students, KIPP high schools have positive impacts on several aspects of college preparation, including more discussions about college, increased likelihood of applying to college, and more advanced coursetaking. This report provides detailed findings and also includes the following appendices: (1) List of KIPP Schools In Network; (2) Detail on Survey Outcomes; (3) Cumulative Middle and High School Results; (4) Detailed Analytic Methods: Elementary School (Lottery-Based Analyses); (5) Detailed Analytic Methods: Middle School (Lottery-Based Analyses); (6) Understanding the Effects of KIPP As It Scales Mathematica Policy Research; (7) Detailed Analytic Methods: Middle School (Matched-Student Analyses); (8) Detailed Analytic Methods: High School (Matched-Student Analyses); (9) Detailed Analytic Methods: High School (Matched-School Analyses); and (10) Detailed Tables For What Works Clearinghouse Review. [For the executive summary, see ED560080; for the focus brief, see ED560043.]

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. Prior studies (see Tuttle et al. 2013) have consistently found that attending a KIPP middle school positively affects student achievement, but few have addressed longer-term outcomes and no rigorous research exists on impacts of KIPP schools at levels other than middle school. In this first high-quality study to rigorously examine the impacts of the network of KIPP public charter schools at all elementary and secondary grade levels, Mathematica found that KIPP schools have positive impacts on student achievement, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels. In addition, the study found positive impacts on student achievement for new entrants to the KIPP network in high school. For students continuing from a KIPP middle school, KIPP high schools' impacts on student achievement are not statistically significant, on average (in comparison to students who did not have the option to attend a KIPP high school and instead attended a mix of other non-KIPP charter, private, and traditional public high schools). Among these continuing students, KIPP high schools have positive impacts on several aspects of college preparation, including more discussions about college, increased likelihood of applying to college, and more advanced coursetaking. This report provides detailed findings and also includes the following appendices: (1) List of KIPP Schools In Network; (2) Detail on Survey Outcomes; (3) Cumulative Middle and High School Results; (4) Detailed Analytic Methods: Elementary School (Lottery-Based Analyses); (5) Detailed Analytic Methods: Middle School (Lottery-Based Analyses); (6) Understanding the Effects of KIPP As It Scales Mathematica Policy Research; (7) Detailed Analytic Methods: Middle School (Matched-Student Analyses); (8) Detailed Analytic Methods: High School (Matched-Student Analyses); (9) Detailed Analytic Methods: High School (Matched-School Analyses); and (10) Detailed Tables For What Works Clearinghouse Review. [For the executive summary, see ED560080; for the focus brief, see ED560043.]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested in the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) as one strategy to support teachers' and students' transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts. This report provides an early look at the implementation of LDC in sixth-grade Advanced Reading classes in a large Florida district, and the effectiveness of the intervention in this setting. The study found that teachers understood LDC and implemented it with fidelity and that curriculum modules were well crafted. Teachers also generally reported positive attitudes about the effectiveness of LDC and its usefulness as a tool for teaching CCSS skills. Although implementation results were highly positive, quasi-experimental analyses employing matched control group and regression discontinuity designs found no evidence of an impact of LDC on student performance on state reading or district writing assessments. Furthermore, students generally performed at basic levels on assessments designed to align with the intervention, suggesting the challenge of meeting CCSS expectations. Exploratory analyses suggest that LDC may have been most effective for higher achieving students. However understandable, the findings thus suggest that, in the absence of additional scaffolding and supports for low-achieving students, LDC may be gap enhancing. Two appendices are included: (1) LDC Instruments and Rubrics; and (2) Summary Report: Developing an Assignment Measure to Assess Quality of LDC Modules (Abby Reisman, Joan Herman, Rebecca Luskin, and Scott Epstein).

In 2009, Vanderbilt University's Peabody Research Institute, in coordination with the Tennessee Department of Education's Division of Curriculum and Instruction, initiated a rigorous, independent evaluation of the state's Voluntary Prekindergarten program (TN- VPK). TN-VPK is a full-day prekindergarten program for four-year-old children expected to enter kindergarten the following school year. The program in each participating school district must meet standards set by the State Board of Education that require each classroom to have a teacher with a license in early childhood development and education, an adult-student ratio of no less than 1:10, a maximum class size of 20, and an approved age-appropriate curriculum. TN-VPK is an optional program focused on the neediest children in the state. It uses a tiered admission process, with children from low-income families who apply to the program admitted first. Any remaining seats in a given location are then allocated to otherwise at-risk children, including those with disabilities and limited English proficiency. The current report presents findings from this evaluation summarizing the longitudinal effects of TN-VPK on pre-kindergarten through third grade achievement and behavioral outcomes for an Intensive Substudy Sample of 1076 children, of which 773 were randomly assigned to attend TN-VPK classrooms and 303 were not admitted. Both groups have been followed since the beginning of the pre-k year.

New Leaders is a nonprofit organization with a mission to ensure high academic achievement for all students by developing outstanding school leaders to serve in urban schools. Its premise is that a combination of preparation and improved working conditions for principals, especially greater autonomy, would lead to improved student outcomes. Its approach involves both preparing principals and partnering with school districts and charter management organizations (CMOs) to improve the conditions in which its highly trained principals work. As part of the partnerships, New Leaders agrees to provide carefully selected and trained principals who can be placed in schools that need principals and to provide coaching and other support after those principals are placed. The districts and CMOs agree to establish working conditions that support, rather than hinder, the principals' efforts to improve student outcomes. This report describes how the New Leaders program was implemented in partner districts, and it provides evidence of the effect that New Leaders has on student achievement. [The research in this report was produced within RAND Education. For the appendices that accompany this report, see ED561154. For the research brief, "Principal Preparation Matters: How Leadership Development Affects Student Achievement. Research Brief," see ED561155.]

The current teacher workforce is younger, less experienced, more likely to turnover, and more diverse in preparation experiences than the workforce of two decades ago. Research shows that inexperienced teachers are less effective, but we know little about the effectiveness of teachers with different types of preparation. In this study, we classify North Carolina public school teachers into "portals"--fixed and mutually exclusive categories that capture teachers' formal preparation and qualifications upon first entering the profession--and estimate the adjusted average test score gains of students taught by teachers from each portal. Compared with undergraduate-prepared teachers from in-state public universities, (a) out-of-state undergraduate-prepared teachers are less effective in elementary grades and high school, (b) alternative entry teachers are less effective in high school, and (c) Teach For America corps members are more effective in STEM subjects and secondary grades.

This randomized control trial examined the efficacy of team-based learning implemented within 11th-grade social studies classes. A randomized blocked design was implemented with 26 classes randomly assigned to treatment or comparison. In the treatment classes teachers implemented team-based learning practices to support students in engaging in dialogue about course content, application of content to solve problems, and use of evidence to support responses. Significant differences in favor of the treatment group on content acquisition were noted (Hedges's g = 0.19). Examination of differences in response to the treatment indicated groups of students classified with high or moderate pretest scores benefitted from the treatment, whereas a group of students classified with low pretest scores did not benefit from the treatment.

Expeditionary Learning (EL) is a growing provider of curriculum and professional development services to teachers and school leaders. The EL model combines an interdisciplinary instructional approach with ongoing training and coaching for teachers and school leaders. The EL curriculum uses an experiential approach in which students conduct research projects to share with outside audiences. Learning expeditions--case-studies of academic topics--often bring together teachers from different subjects to coordinate shared projects; this curriculum includes several elements that are closely aligned with the Common Core standards for English-language arts and literacy. As of the 2010-2011 school year, EL's network included a total of 161 schools in 30 states. This report presents findings from the first rigorous study of the impacts of EL schools. This research aims to use the best available quasi-experimental methods to estimate the impacts of five urban EL middle schools on students' reading and math test scores. Using the study's data on student characteristics, the report also provides additional descriptive information on the types of students who enroll in EL schools. [The report was submitted to Expeditionary Learning.]

This evaluation report presents implementation and impact findings to date regarding the Striving Readers grant as implemented by the Springfield and Chicopee Public School Districts. Any questions regarding this final report should be directed to the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) at the U.S. Department of Education. There were 25,213 students enrolled in Springfield and 7,845 in Chicopee in the 2010-11 school year. The districts differed in terms of student demographics as well as in size. In Springfield, 88% to 92% of the students were designated as minority in the participating schools as compared to 25% to 35% in Chicopee. Over three-quarters of the students in Springfield were also eligible for free or reduced lunch (80% to 84%) as compared to approximately one half in Chicopee (44% to 51%). [This report was prepared by the Research & Evaluation Division at the Education Alliance at Brown University.]

This evaluation report presents implementation and impact findings to date regarding the Striving Readers grant as implemented by the Springfield and Chicopee Public School Districts. Any questions regarding this final report should be directed to the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) at the U.S. Department of Education. There were 25,213 students enrolled in Springfield and 7,845 in Chicopee in the 2010-11 school year. The districts differed in terms of student demographics as well as in size. In Springfield, 88% to 92% of the students were designated as minority in the participating schools as compared to 25% to 35% in Chicopee. Over three-quarters of the students in Springfield were also eligible for free or reduced lunch (80% to 84%) as compared to approximately one half in Chicopee (44% to 51%). [This report was prepared by the Research & Evaluation Division at the Education Alliance at Brown University.]

With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CRESST conducted a multi-year evaluation of a major school reform project at Alain Leroy Locke High School, historically one of California's lowest performing secondary schools. Beginning in 2007, Locke High School transitioned into a set of smaller, Green Dot Charter High Schools, subsequently referred to as Green Dot Locke (GDL) in this report. Based on 9th grade students who entered GDL in 2007 and 2008 respectively, CRESST used a range of student outcomes to monitor progress of the GDL transformation. The CRESST evaluation, employing a strong quasi-experimental design with propensity score matching, found statistically significant, positive effects for the GDL transformation including improved achievement, school persistence, and completion of college preparatory courses. Appended are: (1) Demographic Characteristics and Achievement of the Freshmen at GDL and LAUSD; (2) Cohort Specific Descriptives; and (3) General Descriptives. (Contains 17 figures, 43 tables and 6 footnotes.)

In 2007, using funds from the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) and private foundations, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began piloting its version of a schoolwide reform model called the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP). Under the TAP model, teachers can earn extra pay and take on increased responsibilities through promotion (to mentor teacher or master teacher), and they become eligible for annual performance bonuses based on a combination of their contribution to student achievement (known as "value added") and observed performance in the classroom. The model calls for weekly meetings of teachers and mentors ("cluster groups"), and regular classroom observations by a school leadership team to help teachers meet their performance goals. The idea behind TAP is that giving teachers performance incentives, along with tools to track their performance and improve instruction, will help schools attract and retain talented teachers and help all teachers raise student achievement. This report is the last in a series of reports providing evidence on the impacts of CPS' version of TAP, called "Chicago TAP." It presents findings from the four-year implementation period, with special emphasis on the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years, the third and fourth years of the program's rollout in Chicago. Earlier reports (Glazerman et al. 2009; Glazerman and Seifullah 2010) provide detailed data on each of the first two years of the program, respectively. CPS implemented Chicago TAP as a pilot program intended for 40 high-need schools. The program began in 10 schools in the first year (cohort 1) with a rollout plan to add 10 more Chicago TAP schools (cohorts 2, 3, and 4) in each year of the TIF grant's four-year implementation period. The authors address three research questions regarding Chicago TAP: (1) How was the program implemented?; (2) What impact did the program have on student achievement?; and (3) What impact did the program have on teacher retention within schools? To assess the first year under Chicago TAP for schools that began the program in fall 2009 (cohort 3), the authors looked at how teacher development and compensation practices in Chicago TAP schools differ from practices normally implemented in CPS schools. The authors found that teachers in Chicago TAP schools reported receiving significantly more mentoring support than teachers in similar non-TAP (control) schools. This finding reflects the fact that under the Chicago TAP model, teachers are guided by mentor teachers, and cluster groups meet weekly. They also found that veteran teachers in Chicago TAP schools were more likely than their control group counterparts to provide mentoring support to their colleagues; this finding is consistent with the fact that under Chicago TAP, teachers have the opportunity to assume leadership roles and responsibilities as Chicago TAP mentor or lead teachers. Teachers in Chicago TAP schools (veteran and novice) were aware of their eligibility for performance-based compensation. The authors found that the amount of compensation they expected approached the amount that was eventually paid out; that is, the average expectation was about $900, and the actual amount paid out in bonuses to this group was an average of about $1,100 per teacher. They generally did not find evidence of an impact of Chicago TAP on teacher attitudes or school climate. While the introduction of Chicago TAP led to real changes inside the schools, the program did not consistently raise student achievement as measured by growth in Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) scores. The authors found evidence of both positive and negative test score impacts in selected subjects, years, and cohorts of schools, but overall there was no detectable impact on math, reading, or science achievement that was robust to different methods of estimation. For example, impacts on science scores overall (across years and cohorts) were positive, but not statistically significant unless they used one particular matching method that excluded some Chicago TAP schools from the analysis. The authors did find evidence suggesting that Chicago TAP increased schools' retention of teachers, although the impacts were not uniform or universal across years, cohorts, and subgroups of teachers. They found that teachers who were working in Chicago TAP schools in 2007 returned in each of the following three years at higher rates than teachers in comparable non-TAP schools. For example, the authors found that 67 percent of classroom teachers in cohort 1 schools in fall 2007 returned to their same school in fall 2010 compared to about 56 percent of teachers in non-TAP schools, an impact of nearly 12 percentage points. In other words, teachers in Chicago TAP schools in fall 2007 were about 20% more likely than teachers in comparison schools to be in those same schools three years later. When the authors looked at teachers who were working in schools that started Chicago TAP in later years, some of the impact estimates were not statistically significant. The authors also found some evidence of impacts on retention for subgroups of teachers, such as those with less experience, but the pattern of findings was not consistent. When they considered retention of teachers in the district, the authors did not find consistent evidence of a measurable impact. Given that Chicago TAP is a school-specific program, their main focus was on school-level retention, as opposed to retention in the district. Appended are: (1) Propensity Score Matching; and (2) Supplemental Tables. (Contains 32 tables, 6 figures and 27 footnotes.) [For related reports, see "An Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in Chicago: Year One Impact Report. Final Report" (ED507502) and "An Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in Chicago: Year Two Impact Report" (ED510712).]

A socioeconomic status (SES) gap in mathematical knowledge emerges early and widens prior to school entry. To address this gap, a curricular intervention, "Pre-K Mathematics," was developed and found to be effective in prior efficacy research. In the present project, the next step was taken in evaluating this intervention. Specifically, an effectiveness study was conducted to determine the degree to which the intervention improves pre-kindergarten (4-year-old) children's mathematical knowledge when implemented by local program staff in multiple settings that serve a heterogeneous population of low-SES families. In contrast with the prior efficacy study, the effectiveness study required that all teachers, rather than volunteer teachers, in their public preschool programs be available for random selection and random assignment. It also used curriculum coaches who were either members of the participating school districts or Head Start programs' permanent training staff or independent contractors, depending on the way a program a routinely supported teacher learning for its in-service teaching staff. Participating programs included publicly funded Head Start and state preschool programs serving low-income, ethnically/racially diverse, urban families in California and low-income, predominantly White, rural families in Kentucky and Indiana. A trainer-of-trainers model was used (1) to train curriculum coaches to support teachers' implementation and (2) to train teachers to implement Pre-K Mathematics with adequate fidelity. A two-condition (treatment and control) RCT was conducted, with clusters of pre-kindergarten classrooms as the unit of randomization. Treatment teachers implemented Pre-K Mathematics and control teachers continued their usual classroom practices. Children were assessed at pretest, posttest, and kindergarten follow up using the Child Math Assessment (CMA) and the Test of Early Mathematics Ability, 3rd Edition (TEMA-3). Classroom observations were made to measure the nature and amount of math support provided by treatment and control teachers during the school year. Coaches supported implementation and teachers implemented with adequate to high levels of fidelity. Multi-level analyses revealed that treatment children made significantly greater gains in mathematical knowledge than control children during the pre-kindergarten year as measured by the CMA (ES = 0.83) and TEMA-3 (ES = 0.45). A multilevel mediation analysis found evidence that time spent in mathematically focused small-group activities had a significant indirect effect on children's math outcomes. Thus, this effectiveness study found that the Pre-K Mathematics intervention had a significant positive effect on low-SES children's mathematical knowledge. An implication of this finding is that early mathematics intervention is a promising educational strategy for reducing the SES gap in mathematical knowledge.

This is the final report in a five-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). This report features analyses of student achievement growth four years after the authors carefully assembled longitudinal study panels of MPCP and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) students in 2006-07. The MPCP, which began in 1990, provides government-funded vouchers for low-income children to attend private schools in the City of Milwaukee. The maximum voucher amount in 2010-11 was $6,442, and 20,996 children used a voucher to attend either secular or religious private schools. The MPCP is the oldest and largest urban school voucher program in the United States. This evaluation was authorized by 2005 Wisconsin Act 125, which was enacted in 2006. The primary purpose of the evaluation is twofold: 1) to analyze the effectiveness of the MPCP in promoting growth in student achievement as compared to MPS; and 2) to examine the educational attainment--measured by high school graduation and college enrollment rates--of MPCP and MPS students. The first purpose is accomplished by gauging growth in student achievement--as measured by the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE) in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and grade 10--over a five-year period for a sample of MPCP students and a carefully matched group of MPS students. The second purpose is accomplished by following the 2006-07 8th and 9th grade MPCP and matched MPS cohorts over a five-year period during which they would have had the opportunity to graduate from high school and enroll in college. Appended are: (1) Descriptive Statistics; (2) Attrition Study; and (3) Stability of the Sample. (Contains 4 figures, 12 tables and 14 footnotes.) [For the "MPCP Longitudinal Educational Growth Study: Fourth Year Report. SCDP Milwaukee Evaluation. Report # 23", see ED518597. Additional support for this report was provided by the Robertson Foundation.]

School leaders are increasingly being asked, whether by rhetoric or policy, to measurably improve student achievement. The resultant need to assist school leaders in their ability to improve teaching and learning for all students in their schools led to the establishment of the National Institute of School Leadership's (NISL's) Executive Development Program. The NISL program emphasizes the role of principals as strategic thinkers, instructional leaders, and creators of a just, fair, and caring culture in which all students meet high standards. The current national focus on the importance of effective, instructional leadership has, in turn, led to calls for principal evaluation to be tied directly to student achievement (Davis, Kearney, Sanders, Thomas, and Leon, 2011). Within this milieu, effective and proven principal leadership development programs are crucial. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.) [This report was produced by the Center for Educational Partnerships, Old Dominion University.]

Teach For America (TFA) selects and places graduates from the most competitive colleges as teachers in the lowest-performing schools in the country. This paper is the first study that examines TFA effects in high school. We use rich longitudinal data from North Carolina and estimate TFA effects through cross-subject student and school fixed effects models. We find that TFA teachers tend to have a positive effect on high school student test scores relative to non-TFA teachers, including those who are certified in field. Such effects offset or exceed the impact of additional years of experience and are particularly strong in science. (Contains 1 figure, 14 tables and 14 footnotes.)

This article reports the outcomes of an experimental evaluation of "Read Well Kindergarten" (RWK), a program that focuses on the development of vocabulary, phonological awareness, alphabetic understanding, and decoding. Kindergarten teachers in 24 elementary schools in New Mexico and Oregon were randomly assigned, by school, to teach RWK or their own program. Treatment teachers received 2 days of training and taught daily lessons. Project staff assessed 1,520 students at pretest and 1,428 at posttest with measures of vocabulary, phonological awareness, alphabetic understanding, and decoding. Follow-up testing was conducted in fall and spring of first grade. Analyses of final outcomes revealed a statistically significant difference favoring intervention students on curriculum-based measures of sight words and decodable words. Although these results did not generalize to standardized measures, follow-up analyses indicated that the impact of RWK rested on the rate of opportunities for independent student practice for letter names, letter sounds, sight words, and oral reading fluency, collected at the end of kindergarten. The findings suggest the potential efficacy of RWK in conjunction with frequent opportunities for independent practice for developing beginning reading skills. (Contains 2 figures and 5 tables.)

The effectiveness study examined a supplemental reading intervention that may be appropriate as one component of a response-to-intervention (RTI) system. First-grade students in 31 schools who were at risk for reading difficulties were randomly assigned to receive Responsive Reading Instruction (RRI; Denton, 2001; Denton & Hocker, 2006; n = 182) or typical school practice (TSP; n = 240). About 43% of the TSP students received an alternate school-provided supplemental reading intervention. Results indicated that the RRI group had significantly higher outcomes than the TSP group on multiple measures of reading. About 91% of RRI students and 79% of TSP students met word reading criteria for adequate intervention response, but considerably fewer met a fluency benchmark. (Contains 8 tables.)

This study was conducted by members of a site of the California Writing Project in partnership with a large, urban, low-SES school district where 93% of the students speak English as a second language and 69% are designated Limited English Proficient. Over an eight-year period, a relatively stable group of 55 secondary teachers engaged in ongoing professional development implemented a cognitive strategies approach to reading and writing instruction, making visible for approximately 2000 students per year the thinking tools experienced readers and writers access in the process of meaning construction. The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of this approach on the reading and writing abilities of English language learners (ELLs) in all 13 secondary schools in the district. Students receiving cognitive strategies instruction significantly out-gained peers on holistically scored assessments of academic writing for seven consecutive years. Treatment-group students also performed significantly better than control-group students on GPA, standardized tests, and high-stakes writing assessments. Findings reinforce the importance of having high expectations for ELLs; exposing them to a rigorous language arts curriculum;explicitly teaching, modeling and providing guided practice in a variety of strategies to help students read and write about challenging texts; and involving students as partners in a community of learners. What distinguishes the project is its integrity with respect to its fidelity to three core dimensions: Teachers and students were exposed to an extensive set of cognitive strategies and a wide array of curricular approaches to strategy use (comprehensiveness) in a manner designed to cultivate deep knowledge and application of those strategies in reading and writing (density) over an extended period of time (duration). The consistency of positive outcomes on multiple measures strongly points to the efficacy of using this approach with ELLs. Appended are: (1) Great Expectations Writing Prompt; and (2) Student Models. (Contains 1 note, 5 tables, and 6 figures.)

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 created the Early Reading First (ERF) program to enhance teacher practices, instructional content, and classroom environments in preschools and to help ensure that young children start school with the skills needed for academic success. This report to Congress describes the impacts of the Early Reading First program on the language and literacy skills of children and on the instructional content and practices in preschool classrooms. The main findings of the national evaluation of ERF show that the program had positive, statistically significant impacts on several classroom and teacher outcomes and on one of four child outcomes measured. The program had no effect on children's phonological awareness or oral language. This report contains an executive summary and eight chapters: (1) Introduction and Study Background; (2) Study Design; (3) Characteristics of Participating Children and Families; (4) Characteristics of Programs Receiving ERF Funding; (5) Professional Development, Instructional Practices, and Classroom Environments in ERF Preschools; (6) Impacts on Teachers and Classroom Practices; (7) Impact Findings: ERF Impacts on Children's Language and Literacy Skills and Social-Emotional Outcomes; and (8) Analysis of Mediators of ERF's Impacts on Classroom Instructional Practice and Children's Language and Literacy Skills. Appendices include: (A) Impact Analysis Methods and Sensitivity of Results; (B) Data-Collection Methods; (C) Assessment and Observation Measures Used for ERF Data Collection; (D) Supplementary Tables on the Impacts of ERF on Teachers and Classroom Environments; (E) ERF Impacts on Teacher and Classroom Outcomes; Subgroups Analyses; (F) ERF Impacts on Child Outcomes; Subgroups Analyses; and (G) Supplemental Descriptive Tables for Teacher Outcomes and Classroom Practice. (Contains 63 tables, 12 figures, and 5 exhibits.) [This report was produced by the National Center for Education Evaluation and RegionalAssistance, Institute of Education Sciences.]

Investigates the value of a tiered model of staff development for five districts using "teacher consultants" drawn from a parent district with a long writing project history. Evaluates preconditions, processes and outcomes. Discusses results in terms of student achievement and classroom practices. (SR)

Effects of variations in a schoolwide restructuring program, Success for All, in Baltimore (Maryland) on student reading achievement and other outcomes in elementary schools with large numbers of disadvantaged children are presented. Strong positive effects of the intervention are recognized, and program replication is discussed. (SLD)

Two studies evaluated the use of the Student Team Reading (STR) and Student Team Writing (STW) program in urban middle schools. The first study investigated the use of STR in 20 experimental sixth-grade classes in three schools matched with 39 classes in three control schools. The second study investigated the use of STR and STW in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades in two urban middle schools in Maryland matched with three control schools. In the first study, experimental students achieved significantly higher on a standardized measure of reading comprehension. The reading comprehension achievement of academically handicapped students, analyzed separately, was highly significant in favor of the experimental group. In the second study, the STR and STW students had significantly higher achievement on measures of reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, and language expression. (Two tables of data are included in the first study, and one table of data is included in the second study; 25 references are attached to the first study, and 22 references are attached to the second study.) (Author/RS)

The article presents the results of a randomized experimental study of a writing curriculum for college developmental writing courses based on strategy instruction with self-regulation integrated with practices common in college composition. Students in a full semester course learned strategies for planning and revising based on rhetorical analysis and genres. In addition, they learned metacognitive, self-regulation strategies for goal setting, task management, self-evaluation, and reflection. A prior quasi-experiment found positive effects of the curriculum on writing quality, self-efficacy, and mastery motivation. The current study included 19 instructors and 207 students across two colleges. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) with students nested within instructors and with condition and college as factors and pretest scores as covariates, analyses found positive effects of the treatment for quality of argumentative writing (ES = 1.18), quality of writing on an independent writing assessment (ES = 0.67), and several motivation outcomes, including self-efficacy (for tasks and processes, ES = 0.50; for grammar, ES = 0.36; and for self-regulation, ES = 0.40), affect (ES = 0.32), and beliefs about the importance of content (ES = 0.29). No significant effects were found for grammar/conventions or reading comprehension. Teachers in the treatment condition commented positively on the approach and noted improvements in student writing and motivation. Students also shared positive experiences and noted improvement in their writing. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED614889.]

This study examines the effectiveness of scaling up a vocabulary intervention, pre-K-first grade, using a structured adaptation of the World of Words that allowed teachers some autonomy over its implementation. The purpose was to determine whether such an adaptation could maintain fidelity and promote positive child outcomes. Classrooms (pre-K through grade 1) from 12 elementary schools in a large metropolitan area were randomly selected into treatment (N = 39) and control groups (N = 34). The 21-week intervention involved a shared book reading about science topics, using cross-cutting concepts and vocabulary within taxonomic categories to build knowledge networks. Pre- and posttests examined child outcomes in vocabulary, concepts, and expressive language. Results indicated that fidelity was largely maintained, with significant standardized gains in language and vocabulary for pre-K children. Conversational turns predicted statistically significant improvements in language, suggesting that such adaptations may hold promise for scaling up an intervention.

Previous studies have often compared and contrasted differences among media presentations, including traditional storybooks and videos and their potential for incidental word learning among preschoolers. Studies have shown that children learn words from a variety of media, and that repetition is an important source for incidental learning. Yet, to date, little is known about how repeated presentations of different media, and the possible additive effect of these presentations may affect incidental word learning. Conducted over three phases, 140 preschoolers viewed or listened to two stories, repeated either with a single medium (traditional book "or" video) or two media (book "and" video) to stories. Results indicated that gains in incidental word learning were significantly stronger when children viewed two different media of comparable content compared to two exposures to a single medium. However, neither condition affected children's comprehension of the story. Findings suggest that two media presentations of comparable stories may be more effective in promoting incidental word learning than repeated presentations of a single medium.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the Literacy-Infused Science Using Technology Innovation Opportunity (LISTO) validation project (Valid 45). LISTO was funded by the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund and involved a multi-year intervention that provided virtual professional development and coaching, and literacy-infused science curricula to fifth-grade science teachers who taught predominantly low-income students and in predominantly rural public schools in Texas. The overarching goal of LISTO is to validate, via a 5-year longitudinal randomized controlled trial (RCT) study, literacy-infused science (LIS) instructional and curricular innovations to increase instructional capacity of teachers and to improve students' science and reading/writing literacy achievement in rural/non-rural schools for economically challenged (EC), inclusive of English language learners (ELL) students. Outcomes collected in the 2017-18 school year were considered to be exploratory, given the timing of Hurricane Harvey, which impacted Texas in August of 2017. Outcomes in the 2018-19 school year served as the confirmatory contrasts. LISTO resulted in increased teacher capacity to implement research-based strategies while teaching science content, yet this improvement did not necessarily translate into improved student achievement in science or reading. The LISTO professional development and coaching covered pedagogical strategies for teaching science, including those that have been shown to improve literacy and be particularly effective for ELs. There was a negative impact on students' science achievement in both 2017-18 (ES = -0.10) and in 2018--19 (ES = -0.13). There was a negative program impact on students' science interest (ES = -0.14), as measured by a survey, in 2017-18, and no impact in 2018-19. These quantitative findings were in conflict with qualitative data collected from LISTO teachers, who indicated that the program led to improvements in both science vocabulary and engagement and self-efficacy in science for students. LISTO had positive effects on teacher practices for a subsample of teachers, specifically on increased delivery of research-based instruction to teach science content as rated on a rubric by external reviewers (ES = +1.12). LISTO appeared to improve instructional practices for a sample of teachers who implemented the program for two years with complete data but did not positively impact student or teacher outcomes more broadly. However, results should be cautiously interpreted due to limitations of delayed and incomplete implementation in the first year of the project due to Hurricane Harvey. Encouragingly, teachers' overall positive reactions to the program suggest its potential to improve student affect and learning, but more extensive implementation experience by teachers and multi-year exposure by students starting from early grades may be needed to yield measurable benefits. Clearly, such focuses emerge as a highly recommended topic for future research.

This study examined the effects of a small group intervention targeting paraphrasing and text structure instruction on the main idea generation and reading comprehension of students with reading disabilities in Grades 4 and 5. Students (N = 62) were randomly assigned to receive the Tier 2-type intervention or business-as-usual instruction. Students in the intervention received 25, 40-minute lessons focused on paraphrasing sections of text by identifying the main topic and the most important idea about that topic. Students utilized the text structure organization to inform their main idea generation. Results yielded statistically significant, positive effects in favor of the intervention group on near-transfer and mid-transfer measures of text structure identification (g = 0.75) and main idea generation (g = 0.70), but no statistically significant effect on a far-transfer measure of reading comprehension. These findings provide initial support for utilizing this instruction to improve students' main idea generation on taught and untaught structures.

Inference skill is one of the most important predictors of reading comprehension. Still, there is little rigorous research investigating the effects of inference instruction on reading comprehension. There is no research investigating the effects of inference instruction on reading comprehension for English learners with reading comprehension difficulties. The current study investigated the effects of small-group inference instruction on the inference generation and reading comprehension of sixth- and seventh-grade students who were below-average readers (M = 86.7, SD = 8.1). Seventy-seven percent of student participants were designated limited English proficient. Participants were randomly assigned to 24, 40-min sessions of the inference instruction intervention (n = 39) or to business-as-usual English language arts instruction (n = 39). Membership in the treatment condition statistically significantly predicted higher outcome score on the "Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test" Reading Comprehension subtest (d = 0.60, 95% confidence interval [CI] [0.16, 1.03]), but not on the other measures of inference skill.

The purpose of this cluster randomized group study was to investigate the effect of multitiered, dual-language instruction on children's oral language skills, including vocabulary, narrative retell, receptive and expressive language, and listening comprehension. The participants were 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 81) who were learning English and whose home language was Spanish. Across the school year, classroom teachers in the treatment group delivered large-group lessons in English to the whole class twice per week. For a Tier 2 intervention, the teachers delivered small-group lessons 4 days a week, alternating the language of intervention daily (first Spanish, then English). Group posttest differences were statistically significant, with moderate to large effect sizes favoring the treatment group on all the English proximal measures and on three of the four Spanish proximal measures. Treatment group advantages were observed on Spanish and English norm-referenced standardized measures of language (except vocabulary) and a distal measure of language comprehension. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED603565.]

The purpose of this conceptual replication study was to investigate the efficacy of an early literacy intervention when it was implemented by special educators in general education classrooms with students in the class participating in the lessons. The study was conducted in 16 schools in three states. Eighty students with severe disabilities participated in the study. Students in the intervention group received Early Literacy Skills Builder (ELSB) instruction, and students in the "business-as-usual" control group received literacy instruction planned by special education teachers to address the students' individualized education program literacy goals. Literacy assessments were conducted in five waves scheduled across the school year. Results showed that students receiving ELSB instruction made greater gains in assessed literacy skills than students in the control group. These findings provide evidence that students with severe disabilities can benefit from comprehensive emergent literacy instruction when it is implemented in general education settings. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED601011.]

We present findings from a randomized controlled trial of "Descubriendo la Lectura" (DLL), an intervention designed to improve the literacy skills of Spanish-speaking first graders, who are struggling with reading. DLL offers one-on-one native language literacy instruction for 12 to 20 weeks to each school's lowest performing first-graders. Examining literacy outcomes for 187 students, hierarchical linear model analyses revealed statistically significant effects of student-level assignment to DLL on all 9 outcomes evaluated. Impacts were as large as 1.24 standard deviations, or a learning advantage relative to controls exceeding a full school year of achievement growth. The mean effect size of d = 0.66 across the nine literacy measures is equal to approximately two thirds of the overall literacy growth that occurs across the first-grade year.

The impact of the Good Behavior Game (GBG) on students' classroom behavior has been studied for 50 years. What is less established is the impact of the GBG on students' academic progress. With emerging research in curriculum-based measurement for written expression (WE-CBM), it may be possible to observe changes in students' writing output while playing the GBG versus when the game is not played. The purpose of the current study was to systematically introduce the GBG during writing practice time in a Grade 1 and Grade 2 classroom, and observe any changes to all students' academic engagement, disruptive behavior, as well as target students' writing output using WE-CBM. Results indicated large increases in all students' academic engagement and decreases in disruptive behavior when the GBG was played. For writing output, target students demonstrated modest improvement in the amount of words written and accuracy of writing when the game was played, especially students identified as having emerging writing skills. Future studies might continue to empirically explore the connection between behavioral intervention and academic output by replicating study procedures in different contexts and/or with alternative WE-CBM indices.

Given the growing number of Latino English learners and the lack of evidence-based educational opportunities they are provided, we investigated the impact of one potentially effective literacy intervention that targets struggling first-grade Spanish-speaking students: Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL). DLL provides first-grade Spanish-speaking students one-on-one literacy instruction in their native language and is implemented at an individualized pace for approximately 12 to 20 weeks by trained bilingual teachers. Using a multisite, multicohort, student-level randomized controlled trial, we examined the impact of DLL on both Spanish and English literacy skills. In this article, we report findings from the first of three cohorts of students to participate in the study. Analyses of outcomes indicate that treated students outperformed control students on all 11 Spanish literacy assessments with statistically significant effect sizes ranging from 0.34 to 1.06. Analyses of outcomes on four English literacy assessments yielded positive effect sizes, though none were statistically significant. [This article was published in "AERA Open" (EJ1229779).]

This study is a randomized control trial of full- versus half-day prekindergarten (pre-K) in a school district near Denver, Colorado. Four-year-old children were randomly assigned an offer of half-day (4 days/week) or full-day (5 days/week) pre-K that increased class time by 600 hours. The full-day pre-K offer produced substantial, positive effects on children's receptive vocabulary skills (0.275 standard deviations) by the end of pre-K. Among children enrolled in district schools, full-day participants also outperformed their peers on teacher-reported measures of cognition, literacy, math, physical, and socioemotional development. At kindergarten entry, children offered full day still outperformed peers on a widely used measure of basic literacy. The study provides the first rigorous evidence on the impact of full-day preschool on children's school readiness skills.

Considerable research has examined interventions that facilitate school readiness skills in young children. One intervention, "Red Light, Purple Light Circle Time Games" (RLPL; Tominey and McClelland, 2011; Schmitt et al., 2015), includes music and movement games that aim to foster self-regulation skills. The present study (N = 157) focused on children from families with low-income and compared the RLPL intervention (SR) to a revised version of RLPL that included literacy and math content (SR+) and a Business-As-Usual (BAU) control group. In both versions of the intervention, teachers were trained to administer the self-regulation intervention in preschool classrooms with coaching support. Although not statistically significant, children receiving either version of the intervention gained more in self-regulation on the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS) over the preschool year compared to the BAU group (ß = 0.09, p = 0.082, Cohen's d = 0.31). Effect sizes were similar to previous studies (Schmitt et al., 2015; Duncan et al., 2018) and translated to a 21% difference in self-regulation over and above the BAU group at post-test. Furthermore, children participating in either version of the intervention gained significantly more in math across the school year compared to children in the BAU group (ß = 0.14; p = 0.003, Cohen's d = 0.38), which translated to a 24% difference in math over and above the BAU group at post-test. Results were somewhat stronger for the SR+ version, although effect sizes across intervention conditions were comparable. There were no statistically significant differences across groups for literacy skills. Results extend previous research and suggest that the RLPL intervention, which includes an explicit focus on self-regulation through music and movement games, may improve children's self-regulation and math scores over the preschool year. [This article was published in "Frontiers in Psychology" 2019.]

Considerable research has examined interventions that facilitate school readiness skills in young children. One intervention, "Red Light, Purple Light Circle Time Games" (RLPL; Tominey and McClelland, 2011; Schmitt et al., 2015), includes music and movement games that aim to foster self-regulation skills. The present study (N = 157) focused on children from families with low-income and compared the RLPL intervention (SR) to a revised version of RLPL that included literacy and math content (SR+) and a Business-As-Usual (BAU) control group. In both versions of the intervention, teachers were trained to administer the self-regulation intervention in preschool classrooms with coaching support. Although not statistically significant, children receiving either version of the intervention gained more in self-regulation on the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS) over the preschool year compared to the BAU group (ß = 0.09, p = 0.082, Cohen's d = 0.31). Effect sizes were similar to previous studies (Schmitt et al., 2015; Duncan et al., 2018) and translated to a 21% difference in self-regulation over and above the BAU group at post-test. Furthermore, children participating in either version of the intervention gained significantly more in math across the school year compared to children in the BAU group (ß = 0.14; p = 0.003, Cohen's d = 0.38), which translated to a 24% difference in math over and above the BAU group at post-test. Results were somewhat stronger for the SR+ version, although effect sizes across intervention conditions were comparable. There were no statistically significant differences across groups for literacy skills. Results extend previous research and suggest that the RLPL intervention, which includes an explicit focus on self-regulation through music and movement games, may improve children's self-regulation and math scores over the preschool year. [This article was published in "Frontiers in Psychology" 2019.]

This randomized control trial examined the efficacy of an intervention aimed at improving multisyllabic word reading (MWR) skills among fourth- and fifth-grade struggling readers (n = 109, 48.6% male), as well as the relative effects of an embedded motivational beliefs training component. This study was a closely aligned replication of our earlier work. The intervention was replicated with a three-condition design: MWR only, MWR with a motivational beliefs component, and business-as-usual control. Students were tutored in small groups for 40 lessons (four 40-min lessons each week). When we combined performance of students in both MWR conditions, intervention students significantly outperformed controls on proximal measures of affix reading and MWR, as well as standardized measures of decoding, spelling, and text comprehension. Furthermore, there was a noted interaction between English learner status and treatment on spelling performance. There were no statistically significant main effects between the MWR groups on proximal or standardized measures of interest. Findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to MWR instruction for students with persistent reading difficulties and considerations for future research related to the malleability of motivation.

We examine the efficacy of an intervention to improve word reading and reading comprehension in fourth- and fifth-grade students with significant reading problems. Using a randomized control trial design, we compare the fourth- and fifth-grade reading outcomes of students with severe reading difficulties who were provided a researcher-developed treatment with reading outcomes of students in a business-as-usual (BAU) comparison condition. A total of 280 fourth- and fifth-grade students were randomly assigned within school in a 1:1 ratio to either the BAU comparison condition (n = 139) or the treatment condition (n = 141). Treatment students were provided small-group tutoring for 30 to 45 minutes for an average of 68 lessons (mean hours of instruction = 44.4, SD = 11.2). Treatment students performed statistically significantly higher than BAU students on a word reading measure (effect size [ES] = 0.58) and a measure of reading fluency (ES = 0.46). Though not statistically significant, effect sizes for students in the treatment condition were consistently higher than BAU students for decoding measures (ES = 0.06, 0.08), and mixed for comprehension (ES = -0.02, 0.14).

This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade reading teachers and 105 students (treatment n = 62; control n = 43) and in Year 2, one seventh-grade reading teacher and 87 students (treatment n = 44; control n = 43) from the same public school. In both years, results favored instructed students in word knowledge, lexical access, and morphological awareness on researcher-designed measures. In Year 2, small advances were also found for comprehension. Transcripts of lessons shed light on processes of developing representations of unfamiliar words.

This report presents the SPARK literacy model, an innovative approach developed by Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, for addressing the literacy needs of low-income and minority schools in Milwaukee. It also presents the results of a two-year randomized control trial evaluation of the SPARK literacy program's impact on reading achievement. Through a family-school-community partnership model, SPARK attempts to both build student literacy skills and develop natural supports in the student's family and community that promote a sustained programmatic impact. SPARK was awarded an Investing in Innovation (i3) Department of Education grant to develop the program and test its impact in six Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). While SPARK was still being developed, 251 students were randomly assigned to receive SPARK for two years and 245 were assigned to the "business as usual" control condition. The study found that SPARK had a small but statistically significant positive impact on student reading achievement, but no impact was found on regular school day attendance. Although the results of the study were somewhat mixed, the family-school-community partnership approach employed by SPARK holds great promise for having a sustained impact on student literacy.

Purpose: This study aimed to examine the effect of an intensive vocabulary intervention embedded in e-books on the vocabulary skills of young Spanish-English speaking English learners (ELs) from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds. Method: Children (N = 288) in kindergarten and 1st grade were randomly assigned to treatment and read-only conditions. All children received e-book readings approximately 3 times a week for 10-20 weeks using the same books. Children in the treatment condition received e-books supplemented with vocabulary instruction that included scaffolding through explanations in Spanish, repetition in English, checks for understanding, and highlighted morphology. Results: There was a main effect of the intervention on expressive labeling (g = 0.38) and vocabulary on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Fourth Edition (g = 0.14; Dunn & Dunn, 2007), with no significant moderation effect of initial Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test score. There was no significant difference between conditions on children's expressive definitions. Conclusion: Findings substantiate the effectiveness of computer-implemented embedded vocabulary intervention for increasing ELs' vocabulary knowledge.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative effectiveness of two computer supported approaches to teaching beginning reading skills that differed in important aspects of their instructional approach and emphasis. One of the programs was "Auditory Discrimination in Depth," which provides very explicit instruction and practice in acquiring phonological awareness and phonemic decoding skills. In this program, children spend a lot of time practicing word reading skills out of context, but they also read phonetically controlled text in order to learn how to apply their word reading skills to passages that convey meaning. The other program was "Read, Write, and Type," which provides explicit instruction and practice in phonological awareness, letter sound correspondences, and phonemic decoding, but does so primarily in the context of encouraging children to express themselves in written language. In this program, children spend a greater proportion of their time processing meaningful written material, and they are encouraged to acquire "phonics" knowledge to enable written communication. All the first grade children in five elementary schools were initially screened using a test of letter-sound knowledge. Selection procedures identified 18% of children as the most at risk in these schools to develop problems in learning to read. These 104 children were randomly assigned to the ADD group, and the RWT group. Children were seen from October through May in groups of three children. The children received four, 50 minute sessions per week during this time. Approximately half the time in each instructional session was devoted to direct instruction by a trained teacher in skills and concepts that would be practiced on the computer. The big surprise here was how well everyone did. Particularly in phonemic reading skills, the children in both groups showed very large gains (two full standard deviations) in this area, and their gains in fluency were almost as strong as those for accuracy. The results are encouraging for both intervention programs. It is also important to note that the reading comprehension scores were higher than expected based on the children's estimated general verbal ability.

Efficacy of an intensive reading intervention implemented during the nonacademic summer was evaluated in children with reading disabilities or difficulties (RD). Students (ages 6-9) were randomly assigned to receive Lindamood-Bell's "Seeing Stars" program (n = 23) as an intervention or to a waiting-list control group (n = 24). Analysis of pre- and posttesting revealed significant interactions in favor of the intervention group for untimed word and pseudoword reading, timed pseudoword reading, oral reading fluency, and symbol imagery. The interactions mostly reflected (a) significant declines in the nonintervention group from pre- to posttesting, and (2) no decline in the intervention group. The current study offers direct evidence for widening differences in reading abilities between students with RD who do and do not receive intensive summer reading instruction. Intervention implications for RD children are discussed, especially in relation to the relevance of summer intervention to prevent further decline in struggling early readers.

The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The principal aims of the two experiments described in this paper were to examine whether second through fourth graders, who use home English in contexts where more formal school English is expected, can be taught to dialect shift between home and school English depending on context; and whether this leads to stronger writing and literacy outcomes. The results of two randomized controlled trials with students within classrooms randomly assigned to DAWS (Dialect Awareness, a program to explicitly teach dialect shifting), editing instruction, or a business as usual group revealed (1) that DAWS was more effective in promoting dialect shifting than instruction that did not explicitly contrast home and school English; and (2) that students in both studies who participated in DAWS were significantly more likely to use school English in contexts where it was expected on proximal and distal outcomes including narrative writing, morphosyntactic awareness, and reading comprehension. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

School psychologists will likely become more involved in supporting the reading achievement of English language learners (ELLs). This requires evidence-based interventions that are validated for ELL students. Incremental rehearsal (IR) is an evidence-based intervention for teaching words, but the resource intensity often precludes its use. Using peers as interventionists may increase the contextual validity of IR while maintaining the benefits when compared with other drill techniques. This efficacy study examined if (a) peer-mediated IR (PMIR) was effective for teaching ELL students high-frequency words and (b) improvements in word reading generalized to changes in students' oral reading fluency. Five ELL students participated in a randomized multiple-baseline design across participants. Results indicated that PMIR was functionally related to an increase in word reading for all 5 participants. Effect sizes estimated using TauU and multilevel modeling indicated that PMIR had a large effect on sight-word reading. No functional relationship between PMIR and oral reading fluency was observed. PMIR was generally acceptable to target students and peer tutors. Limitations and potential implications of the results are discussed.

Researchers are increasingly interested in working memory (WM) training. However, it is unclear whether it strengthens comprehension in young children who are at risk for learning difficulties. We conducted a modest study of whether the training of verbal WM would improve verbal WM and passage listening comprehension and whether training effects differed between two approaches: training with and without strategy instruction. A total of 58 first-grade children were randomly assigned to three groups: WM training with a rehearsal strategy, WM training without strategy instruction, and controls. Each member of the two training groups received a one-to-one, 35-min session of verbal WM training on each of 10 consecutive school days, totaling 5.8 hr. Both training groups improved on trained verbal WM tasks, with the rehearsal group making greater gains. Without correction for multiple group comparisons, the rehearsal group made reliable improvements over controls on an untrained verbal WM task and on passage listening comprehension and listening retell measures. The no-strategy-instruction group outperformed controls on passage listening comprehension. When corrected for multiple contrasts, these group differences disappeared but were associated with moderate to large effect sizes. Findings suggest--however tentatively--that brief but intensive verbal WM training may strengthen the verbal WM and comprehension performance of young children at risk. Necessary caveats and possible implications for theory and future research are discussed.

The acquisition of early mathematical knowledge is critical for successful long-term academic development. Mathematical language is one of the strongest predictors of children's early mathematical success. Findings from previous studies have provided correlational evidence supporting the importance of mathematical language to the development of children's mathematics skills, but there is limited causal evidence supporting this link. To address this research gap, 47 Head Start children were randomly assigned to a mathematical language intervention group or a business-as-usual group. Over the course of eight weeks, interventionists implemented a dialogic reading intervention focused on quantitative and spatial mathematical language. At posttest, students in the intervention group significantly outperformed the students in the comparison group not only on a mathematical language assessment, but on a mathematical knowledge assessment as well. These findings indicate that increasing children's exposure to mathematical language can positively affect their general mathematics skills. This study is an important first step in providing causal evidence of the importance of early mathematical language for children's general mathematical knowledge and the potential for mathematical language interventions to increase children's overall mathematics abilities.

This article reports on a 4-year follow-up study from the Learning Experiences and Alternative Program for Preschoolers and Their Parents (LEAP) randomized trial of early intervention for young children with autism. Overall, participants from LEAP classes were marginally superior to comparison class children on elementary school outcomes specific to communication, adaptive behavior, social, academic, and cognitive skills. Statistically significant group differences were noted in cognitive development and social skills. However, when placement was treated as an independent variable, very large effects were seen across all outcome measures, including autism symptoms, for children who were enrolled in inclusive settings. Data from adult family members confirmed important changes in perceived quality of life. [This paper was published in "Topics in Early Childhood Special Education" (EJ1148719).]

This study reports 2 years of findings from a randomized controlled trial designed to replicate and demonstrate the efficacy of an existing, successful professional development program, the Pathway Project, that uses a cognitive strategies approach to text-based analytical writing. Building on an earlier randomized field trial in a large, urban, low socioeconomic status (SES) district in which 98% of the students were Latino and 88% were mainstreamed English learners (ELs) at the intermediate level of fluency, the project aimed to help secondary school students, specifically Latinos and mainstreamed ELs, in another large, urban, low-SES district to develop the academic writing skills called for in the rigorous Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. The Pathway Project draws on well-documented instructional frameworks that support approaches that incorporate strategy instruction to enhance students' academic literacy. Ninety-five teachers in 16 secondary schools were stratified by school and grade and then randomly assigned to the Pathway or control group. Pathway teachers participated in 46 hr of training to help students write analytical essays. Difference-in-differences and regression analyses revealed significant effects on student writing outcomes in both years of the intervention (Year 1, d = 0.48; Year 2, d = 0.60). Additionally, Pathway students had higher odds than control students of passing the California High School Exit Exam in both years.

Reading achievement scores for adolescents with disabilities are markedly lower than the scores of adolescents without disabilities. For example, 62% of students with disabilities read "below" the basic level on the NAEP Reading assessment, compared to 19% of their nondisabled peers. This achievement gap has been a continuing challenge for more than 35 years. In this article, we report on the promise of a comprehensive 2-year reading program called Fusion Reading. Fusion Reading is designed to significantly narrow the reading achievement gap of middle school students with reading disabilities. Using a quasi-experimental design with matched groups of middle school students with reading disabilities, statistically significant differences were found between the experimental and comparison conditions on multiple measures of reading achievement with scores favoring the experimental condition. The effect size of the differences were Hedges's g = 1.66 to g = 1.04 on standardized measures of reading achievement.

Purpose: We examined the effects of a text-processing reading comprehension intervention emphasizing listening comprehension and expressive language practices with middle school students with reading difficulties. Method: A total of 134 struggling readers in grades 6-8 were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 83) and control conditions (n = 51) using a 2:1 ratio (two students randomized to treatment for every one student randomized to control). Students in the treatment condition received 40 min of daily instruction in small groups of four to six students for approximately 17 hr. Results: One-way analysis of covariance models on outcome measures with the respective pretest scores as a covariate revealed significant gains on proximal measures of vocabulary and key word and main idea formulation. No significant differences were found on standardized measures of listening and reading comprehension. Discussion: Results provide preliminary support for integrating listening comprehension and expressive language practices within a text-processing reading comprehension intervention framework for middle-grade struggling readers.

Comprehension monitoring has received substantial attention as a reading comprehension strategy. However, comprehension monitoring is not limited to the reading context, but applies to the oral context for children's listening comprehension, which is a critical foundation for reading comprehension. Therefore, a systematic and explicit instructional routine for comprehension monitoring in oral language contexts was developed for prekindergartners from low-income families. Instruction was provided in small groups for approximately 5 min a day for 4 days a week for 8 weeks. Results showed that children who received comprehension monitoring instruction were better at identifying inconsistencies in short stories than those who received typical instruction with a medium effect size (d = 0.57). These results suggest comprehension monitoring is malleable and can be taught in the oral language context to prereaders from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Furthermore, the instructional routine reported in this study is flexible for individual, small group, or whole class settings, and likely can be easily delivered by educators such as teachers and paraeducators.

This report presents the final results of a four-year independent external evaluation of the impacts and implementation of the scale-up of Reading Recovery, a literacy intervention targeting struggling 1st-grade students. The evaluation of Reading Recovery includes parallel rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental designs for estimating program impacts, coupled with a large-scale, mixed-methods study of program implementation under the Investing in Innovation (i3) scale-up. The primary goals of the evaluation are to: (1) Provide experimental evidence of the short- and long-term impacts of Reading Recovery on student learning in schools that are part of the i3 scale-up; and (2) Assess the implementation of Reading Recovery under the i3 grant, including fidelity to the program model and progress toward the scale-up goals. The impact evaluation includes a multi-site randomized controlled trial (RCT) for estimating immediate impacts, a regression discontinuity study (RD) for estimating longterm impacts, and an implementation study for assessing fidelity of implementation and exploring program implementation in depth. The RCT includes nearly 7,000 randomized students in more than 1,200 schools over four years. The RD study measures Reading Recovery's impacts at the end of first grade and in third grade, and replicates the RCT's immediate post-treatment findings in a separate sample of students. The implementation study involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative research executed on a large scale over the same four-year timeframe. The evaluation's key findings pertain to the following topics: (1) Scale-Up Processes, Challenges, and Outcomes; (2) Immediate Impacts of Reading Recovery; (3) Sustained Impacts of Reading Recovery; and (4) Implementation Fidelity. The authors' analysis revealed strong fidelity to the program model in all of these areas and all years of the scale-up. This suggests that the intervention was delivered as designed to the students in the scale-up, and that teachers delivering Reading Recovery lessons were properly trained. In total, the results of the fidelity analysis support the validity of their impact findings. Three appendices are included. [To view the brief for this report, "Evidence for Early Literacy Intervention: The Impacts of Reading Recovery," see ED586802.]

There is a critical need, according to national policy statements in the United States, to integrate information and communication technologies into instruction, and yet research about the effect of such integration on the literacy learning of at-risk populations is scant. In addition, barriers exist that prevent teachers from realizing the goal of information and communication technology integration. To address this issue, we conducted a mixed-methods study to investigate the effects of LetterWorks, an iPad app, on the letter learning of 6- to 7-year-old children in an early literacy intervention, Reading Recovery. We present empirical evidence about the effects of the integration of this iPad app into literacy instruction for struggling learners and we describe teachers' perceptions about the affordances and challenges of integrating this app into their instruction. Despite the positive effects of the iPad app on the letter learning of the children in the treatment group, teachers identified a misfit between their beliefs about literacy teaching and learning and the app as a barrier to their continued use. We suggest that the successful uptake of information and communication technologies into literacy instruction may depend, at least in part, on whether and how well training addresses the coherence between the information and communication technology itself and teachers' theories about teaching and learning.

The Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) was developed by California State University (CSU) faculty and high school educators to improve the academic literacy of high school seniors, thereby reducing the need for students to enroll in remedial English courses upon entering college. This report, produced by Innovation Studies at WestEd, presents the findings of an independent evaluation of the ERWC funded by an Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The study sample for the evaluation included more than 5,000 12th grade students in 24 high schools across nine California school districts in the 2013/14 school year. The authors of the report found that the ERWC has a statistically significant positive impact on student achievement. Results from an analysis of implementation fidelity are also presented, along with qualitative findings based on survey data from study participants. Appendixes include: (1) Statistical Power for Impact Estimates; (2) Data Collection Instruments to Measure Fidelity of Implementation; and (3) Rubric for Calculating Fidelity of Implementation for Each Component of the Expository Reading and Writing Course.

The purpose of this study was to support teachers' child-directed language and student outcomes by enhancing the educative features of an intervention targeted to vocabulary, conceptual development and comprehension. Using a set of design heuristics (Davis & Krajcik, 2005), our goal was to support teachers' professional development within the curriculum materials. Ten pre-K classrooms with a total of 143 children were randomly selected into treatment and control groups. Observations of teacher talk, including characteristics of lexically-rich and cognitively demanding language were conducted before and during the intervention. Measures of child outcomes, pre- and post-intervention included both standardized and curriculum-based assessments. Results indicated significant improvements in the quality of teachers' talk in the treatment compared to the control group, and significant gains for child outcomes. These results suggest that educative curriculum may be a promising approach to facilitate both teacher and student learning.

The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the effects of using content acquisition podcasts (CAPs), an example of instructional technology, to provide vocabulary instruction to adolescents with and without learning disabilities (LD). A total of 279 urban high school students, including 30 with LD in an area related to reading, were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions with instruction occurring at individual computer terminals over a 3-week period. Each of the four conditions contained different configurations of multimedia-based instruction and evidence-based vocabulary instruction. Dependent measures of vocabulary knowledge indicated that students with LD who received vocabulary instruction using CAPs through an explicit instructional methodology and the keyword mnemonic strategy significantly outperformed other students with LD who were taught using the same content, but with multimedia instruction that did not adhere to a specific theoretical design framework. Results for general education students mirrored those for students with LD. Students also completed a satisfaction measure following instruction with multimedia and expressed overall agreement that CAPs are useful for learning vocabulary terms.

A two-cohort cluster randomized trial was conducted to estimate effects of small-group supplemental vocabulary instruction for at-risk kindergarten English learners (ELs). "Connections" students received explicit instruction in high-frequency decodable root words, and interactive book reading (IBR) students were taught the same words in a storybook reading context. A total of 324 EL students representing 24 home languages and averaging in the 10th percentile in receptive vocabulary completed the study ("Connections" n = 163 in 75 small groups; IBR n = 161 in 72 IBR small groups). Although small groups in both conditions made significant immediate gains across all measures, "Connections" students made significantly greater gains in reading vocabulary and decoding (d = 0.64 and 0.45, respectively). At first-grade follow-up, longer-term gains were again greater for Connections students, but with smaller effect sizes (d = 0.29 and 0.27, respectively). Results indicate that explicit "Connections" instruction features designed to build semantic, orthographic and phonological connections for word learning were effective for improving proximal reading vocabulary and general decoding; however, increases in root word reading vocabulary did not transfer to general vocabulary knowledge. Additional tables are presented in two appendices. [At time of submission to ERIC this article was in press with the "Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness."]

Chicago Public Schools initiated the Excellence in Teaching Project, a teacher evaluation program designed to increase student learning by improving classroom instruction through structured principal-teacher dialogue. The pilot began in forty-four elementary schools in 2008-09 (cohort 1) and scaled up to include an additional forty-eight elementary schools in 2009-10 (cohort 2). Leveraging the experimental design of the roll-out, cohort 1 schools performed better in reading and math than cohort 2 schools at the end of the first year, though the math effects are not statistically significant. We find the initial improvement for cohort 1 schools remains even after cohort 2 schools adopted the program. Moreover, the pilot differentially impacted schools with different characteristics. Higher-achieving and lower-poverty schools were the primary beneficiaries, suggesting the intervention was most successful in more advantaged schools. These findings are relevant for policy makers and school leaders who are implementing evaluation systems that incorporate classroom observations.

This chapter concerns a year-long, United States federally-funded evaluation of Educate Online, an online, at home, 1:1 tutoring program aimed at improving reading performance for middle school students who are below grade level. Participating students receive after-school instruction from teachers in real-time over Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) connections. The researcher discusses study findings, the methodological challenges of conducting research on online tutoring, the multiple perspectives for understanding the effectiveness of a tutoring program, and areas for additional research. The chapter examines a key aspect of the evaluation, a delayed treatment control group design study to determine the effect that involvement in the tutoring program has upon student academic achievement in reading. [This chapter was published in: F. J. García-Peñalvo, A. M. Seoane Pardo (Eds.), "Online Tutor 2.0: Methodologies and Case Studies for Successful Learning," (pp. 264-279). Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2014. (978-1-4666-5832-5 / 2326-8905).]

This is the second of three reports from MDRC's evaluation of the Success for All (SFA) scale-up demonstration, funded under the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) competition. The report presents updated findings on SFA's implementation and impacts in the scale-up sites participating in the evaluation. The i3 evaluation of SFA employs an experimental design, in which 37 schools in five school districts that are participating in the scale-up effort were assigned at random to a program group or to a control group. The two groups of schools were similar on all school-level characteristics at baseline, although they were not fully representative of all schools participating in SFA's i3 scale-up. The 19 program group schools received SFA. The 18 control group schools did not get the intervention and, instead, either continued with the same reading program that they had used previously or, in the case of some schools, adopted a new one. The study compares the experiences of adults and the performance of students in the two groups of schools. This second report tracks the literacy growth of the initial group of kindergartners as they advanced through first grade, and it also measures the reading skills of students in grades 3 through 5. Like the first report, this report uses quantitative and qualitative data from a variety of sources. Through teacher and principal surveys, implementation summaries completed by SFA staff, logs completed by teachers to describe the instruction that they provided to individual students, interviews and focus groups with school personnel conducted in the course of site visits, school district databases, and individual and group assessments of students' reading skills, it addresses three main questions: (1) To what extent were SFA's features implemented during the program's second year? (2) How distinct were the program group schools and the control group schools in various aspects of school functioning? (3) Did SFA continue to produce impacts on students' reading skills as the students progressed through first grade? In brief, the report finds that, during the second year, schools strengthened their implementation of SFA, and teachers were more at ease with it. Reading instruction in SFA schools continued to differ from instruction in control group schools in a number of respects, although in other ways the two groups of schools were similar. Finally, first-graders who had been enrolled in SFA schools since kindergarten significantly outperformed their counterparts who had been continuously enrolled in control group schools on two measures of phonetic and decoding skills, although not on measures of higher-order reading skills. At this point, the impact findings about the students' academic trajectories are consistent with those reported in the major previous experimental study of SFA. Four appendices include: (1) Data Sources and Response Rates; (2) Subgroup Impacts; (3) Full-Sample Impacts; and (4) Auxiliary-Sample Impacts. [This report was written with Emma Alterman and Emily Pramik.]

This study aimed to determine the efficacy of a content acquisition and reading comprehension treatment implemented by eighth-grade social studies teachers. Using a within-teacher design, the eighth-grade teachers' social studies classes were randomly assigned to treatment or comparison conditions. Teachers (n = 5) taught the same instructional content to both treatment and comparison classes, but the treatment classes used instructional practices focused on teaching essential words, text as a source for reading and discussion, and team-based learning approaches. Students in the treatment conditions (n = 261) scored statistically higher than students in the comparison conditions (n = 158) on all three outcomes: content acquisition (ES = 0.17), content reading comprehension (ES = 0.29), and standardized reading comprehension (ES = 0.20). Findings are interpreted as demonstrating support for the treatment in improving both knowledge acquisition and reading comprehension within content area instruction. (Contains 8 tables, 1 figure, and 1 note.)

This field-based randomized trial examined the effect of assignment to and participation in summer school for two moderately at-risk samples of struggling readers. Application of multiple regression models to difference scores capturing the change in summer reading fluency revealed that kindergarten students randomly assigned to summer school outperformed their control group peers by 0.60 of a standard deviation in an intent-to-treat analysis. For the first grade sample, the intent-to-treat estimate was over three quarters of a standard deviation. The contrast in performance was greater when the comparison was focused more specifically on the change in literacy between treatment participants (i.e., randomly assigned students who actually attended summer school) and students randomly assigned to the control group and in analyses that explicitly adjusted for non-compliance with treatment assignment. These results support the experiential intuition of school district personnel regarding the benefits of summer school and suggest that targeted summer instruction can be a useful strategy to support student learning over the summer months. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.)

This study evaluated whether the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), a classroom teacher professional development program delivered through webcam technology literacy coaching, could provide rural classroom teachers with the instructional skills to help struggling readers progress rapidly in early reading. Fifteen rural schools were randomly assigned to the experimental or control condition. Five struggling readers and 5 non-struggling readers were randomly selected from eligible children in each classroom. There were 75 classrooms and 631 children in the study. Teachers in experimental schools used the TRI in one-on-one sessions with 1 struggling reader in the regular classroom for 15 min a day until that struggler made rapid reading progress. Teachers then moved on to another struggling reader until all 5 struggling readers in the class received the TRI during the year. Biweekly webcam coaching sessions between the coach and teacher allowed the coach to see and hear the teacher as she instructed a struggling reader in a TRI session, and the teacher and child could see and hear the coach. In this way the classroom teacher was able to receive real-time feedback from the coach. Three-level hierarchical linear models suggested that struggling readers in the intervention schools significantly outperformed the struggling readers in the control schools, with effect sizes from 0.36 to 0.63 on 4 individualized achievement tests. Results suggested that struggling readers were gaining at the same rate as the non-struggling readers, but they were not catching up with their non-struggling peers.

This article describes a randomized controlled trial conducted to evaluate the effects of an intensive, individualized, Tier 3 reading intervention for second grade students who had previously experienced inadequate response to quality first grade classroom reading instruction (Tier 1) and supplemental small-group intervention (Tier 2). Also evaluated were cognitive characteristics of students with inadequate response to intensive Tier 3 intervention. Students were randomized to receive the research intervention (N = 47) or the instruction and intervention typically provided in their schools (N = 25). Results indicated that students who received the research intervention made significantly better growth than those who received typical school instruction on measures of word identification, phonemic decoding, and word reading fluency and on a measure of sentence- and paragraph-level reading comprehension. Treatment effects were smaller and not statistically significant on phonemic decoding efficiency, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension in extended text. Effect sizes for all outcomes except oral reading fluency met criteria for substantive importance; however, many of the students in the intervention continued to struggle. An evaluation of cognitive profiles of adequate and inadequate responders was consistent with a continuum of severity (as opposed to qualitative differences), showing greater language and reading impairment prior to the intervention in students who were inadequate responders.

This study describes an evaluation of a read aloud intervention to improve comprehension and vocabulary of first-grade students. Twelve teachers were randomly assigned to an intervention or comparison condition. The study lasted 19 weeks, and the intervention focused on the systematic use of narrative and expository texts and dialogic interactions between teachers and students delivered in whole-classroom formats. Read aloud intervention lessons included before-, during-, and after-reading components and explicit instruction targeted comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. Teachers in the comparison condition implemented the same amount of read aloud instruction, focusing on strategies they believed would help their students with comprehension and vocabulary. On some, but not all, outcome measures, intervention students at low risk and high risk for language difficulties outperformed comparable students in the comparison group. Implications are discussed. (Contains 1 note and 7 tables.)

Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds (SES) are at increased risk of reading problems. Although phonological awareness consistently emerges as a critical literacy skill for children, little research exists regarding the effects of the acquisition of phonological awareness skills on decreasing the reading achievement gap between children of different SES levels. In this study, 50 first graders from low SES backgrounds were randomly assigned to receive 10 weeks of phonological awareness intervention or a control condition. In addition, 25 first graders from middle-high SES backgrounds served as a comparison group. A significant difference in phonological awareness skills was found between children in the low SES intervention group who received the phonological awareness intervention and similar children in the control group who did not receive the intervention. Reading skill differences between the low SES intervention and control groups were found at follow-up 24 weeks later but not immediately following intervention. Although the gap in reading skills of children from the low SES intervention group and the middle-high SES comparison group decreased, reading differences remained. Implications of findings with regard to prevention and identification of children at-risk for reading difficulties, as well as planning and implementing early literacy intervention for children from disadvantaged backgrounds are provided.

The response-to-intervention model is predicated upon increasingly intensive tiers of instruction. The aim of the present study was to examine the efficacy of a Tier-2 small-group literacy intervention ("MiniLit") designed for young readers who are still struggling after experiencing whole-class initial instruction. A total of 22 students in Kindergarten and Year 2 at a New South Wales public school were randomly allocated to form two comparable groups. The experimental group received the Tier-2 small-group literacy intervention for one hour per day for four days per week for three school terms (27 weeks of instruction) while the control group continued to receive regular whole-class literacy instruction during this time. All students were assessed on four measures of reading and related skills before the intervention commenced, again after two terms of instruction and once more after three terms of instruction. Large and statistically significant mean differences between the two groups were evident at post-test on two of the four tests employed measuring phonological recoding and single word reading. Large effect sizes provided evidence for the efficacy of the small-group intervention for young struggling readers. (Contains 5 figures, 1 table and 1 note.)

Longitudinal results for a randomized-controlled trial (RCT) assessing the impact of increasing preschoolers' attention to print during reading are reported. Four-year-old children (N = 550) in 85 classrooms experienced a 30-week shared reading program implemented by their teachers. Children in experimental classrooms experienced shared-book readings 2 or 4 times per week during which their teachers verbally and nonverbally referenced print. Children in comparison classrooms experienced their teachers' typical book reading style. Longitudinal results (n = 356, 366) showed that use of print references had significant impacts on children's early literacy skills (reading, spelling, comprehension) for 2 years following the RCT's conclusion. Results indicate a causal relation between early print knowledge and later literacy skills and have important implications concerning the primary prevention of reading difficulties.

The purpose of this evaluation of Scholastic's "System 44" conducted by RMC Research was to expand the existing research on students with learning disabilities by conducting a randomized study of struggling readers with approximately half of the sample comprised of students with learning disabilities. Specifically, this evaluation examined the impact of "System 44" on the reading outcomes of struggling readers and on a subsample of students with learning disabilities in Grades 4-8. The evaluation of the implementation and impact of "System 44" involved 12 elementary schools and 4 middle and K-8 schools in a district in Michigan. Scholastic's "System 44" is a foundational reading program intended for older struggling readers who have not mastered basic phonics and decoding skills. Combining researched-based phonics instruction with adaptive technology, "System 44" is designed to improve students' word reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. The "System 44" program delivers research-based instruction through an adaptive computer component; teacher-led small-group instruction; and individual student practice involving high-interest, leveled materials. Thus students who have not responded to classroom reading instruction may benefit from the more intensive and specific decoding instruction provided through "System 44." The evaluators selected the target sample based on student performance on the fall 2011 Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) and spring 2011 AIMSweb assessment. The Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) was used to screen students for "System 44" eligibility. The district administered the SRI to all students in the target sample. Those students who scored below 600 Lexiles on the SRI were administered the Scholastic Phonics Inventory (SPI). All students who scored in the Beginning or Developing reader categories on the SPI were randomly assigned (stratified by school and grade level) to either the "System 44" treatment group or the control group. RMC Research hired and trained 4 local testers to individually administer a battery of standardized reading tests to all treatment and control group students. The testers administered the tests in October 2011 to establish baseline scores and again in May 2012 to attain follow-up scores. The tests included the following: (1) Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension (TOSREC); (2) Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) Elision subtest; (3) Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) Sight Word Efficiency subtest; and (4) Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) Phonetic Decoding Efficiency subtest. The evaluation of "System 44" revealed significant impacts on several tests for both the overall sample and the learning disabled sample. Additional findings revealed that impacts were stronger on several tests for middle school students than for elementary school students, particularly on SPI Nonsense Word Accuracy, TOSREC, and SRI. Although significant impacts were attained by the end of Year 1, the majority of students in the study did not complete the "System 44" program. Data collected through teacher surveys, classroom visits, and interviews provided information on teachers' implementation of "System 44" in the classroom, and software usage data were used to examine differences in students with varying program exit and topic completion patterns. [For the November 2011 report, see ED613693.]

Scholastic's "System 44" is a foundational reading program intended for older struggling readers who have not mastered basic phonics and decoding skills. Combining researched-based phonics instruction with adaptive technology, "System 44" is designed to improve students' word reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. The "System 44" program delivers research-based instruction through an adaptive computer component; teacher-led small group instruction; and individual student practice involving high-interest, leveled materials. Thus students who have not responded to classroom reading instruction may benefit from the more intensive and specific decoding instruction provided through "System 44." Using a randomized design, this evaluation assessed the effectiveness of "System 44" in terms of improving the foundational reading skills of struggling readers in Grades 4-8 in a large suburban school district in southern California during the 2010-2011 school year. The evaluation of the implementation and impact of "System 44" involved 7 of the 11 elementary schools and all 4 middle schools in the district. A 2-step process was used to establish student eligibility for "System 44." The Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) was used to screen students in Grades 4-8 who performed below the 50th percentile on the spring 2010 California Standards Test (CST) for "System 44" eligibility. Those students who scored below 600 Lexiles on the SRI were administered the Scholastic Phonics Inventory (SPI), a computer-based test used to identify students in need of additional phonics instruction. Students who scored in the Beginning or Developing reader categories on the SPI were randomly assigned (stratified by school and grade level) to either the "System 44" treatment group or the control group. Data collection activities for the "System 44" evaluation included student reading tests, teacher surveys, "System 44" classroom observations, a professional development observation, and staff interviews. RMC Research hired and trained 4 local testers to administer a battery of standardized reading tests to all treatment and control students. The testers administered the tests to each student separately over a 3-week period in September and October 2010 to establish baseline scores and again in May 2011 to attain follow-up scores. Listed in order of administration, the tests included the following: (1) Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension (TOSREC); (2) Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) Elision subtest; (3) Woodcock-Johnson III Word Identification subtest; (4) Woodcock-Johnson III Word Attack subtest; (5) Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) Sight Word Efficiency subtest; and (6) Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) Phonetic Decoding Efficiency subtest. This report details the program impact findings and concludes with recommendations from the evaluation team.

The authors describe an independent evaluation of the READ 180 Enterprise intervention designed by Scholastic, Inc. Despite widespread use of the program with upper elementary through high school students, there is limited empirical evidence to support its effectiveness. In this randomized controlled trial involving 312 students enrolled in an after-school program, the authors generated intention-to-treat and treatment-on-the-treated estimates of the program's impact on several literacy outcomes of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders reading below proficiency on a state assessment at baseline. READ 180 Enterprise students outperformed control group students on vocabulary (d = 0.23) and reading comprehension (d = 0.32) but not on spelling and oral reading fluency. The authors interpret the findings in light of the theory of instruction underpinning the READ 180 Enterprise intervention. (Contains 2 figures, 7 tables, and 4 notes.)

Portland Public Schools (PPS), the largest school district in Oregon, serves more than 46,000 students in regular and special programs. More than 2,900 classroom teachers address the needs of a diverse student population (44% minority, 46% low income, 14% special education, 9% English language learners). A district needs assessment in fall 2005 revealed that 13 of Portland's 85 regular schools were eligible to participate in the Striving Readers program. Four of the high schools and 5 of the middle schools determined that they could meet the program's research requirements. All 9 schools had at each grade level a significant number of students who were at least 2 years behind in reading achievement; all received Title I funding; and none had achieved Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind at the time of the Striving Readers application. School leaders expected the Striving Readers program to impact more than 6,400 students and 450 teachers in the 9 participating schools. After examining adolescent reading programs and studying the research on adolescent literacy, Portland Public Schools selected the Strategic Instruction Model Content Literacy Continuum developed by the University of Kansas' Center for Research on Learning to improve teacher instruction and student reading achievement in the participating middle and high schools. This report summarizes Year 1 (2006-2007), Year 2 (2007-2008), Year 3 (2008-2009), Year 4 (2009-2010), and Year 5 (2010-2011) of implementation of the targeted intervention for students reading at least 2 years below grade level in Grades 7-10 and the whole school intervention designed to help all students in Grades 6-12 learn the critical content in all curricular areas.

This experimental study reports findings on the effects from a year-long reading intervention providing daily 50-min sessions to middle school students with identified learning disabilities (n = 65) compared with similar students who did not receive the reading intervention (n = 55). All students continued to receive their special education services as provided by the school. Statistically significant results favored the treatment group for sight word reading fluency following intervention. Small effects were found for phonemic decoding fluency and passage comprehension. No other statistically significant differences were noted between groups. The findings suggest that although gains on word reading fluency resulted from the additional reading treatment, accelerating the reading performance of students identified with learning disabilities may be unlikely to result from a 1-year daily intervention provided in groups of 10 to 15 students. (Contains 2 tables.)

The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of a Tier 2 standard protocol supplemental intervention designed simultaneously to develop root word vocabulary and reinforce decoding skills being taught to all students in the core beginning reading program with kindergarten Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs). Participating students were drawn from six public elementary schools in the Midwest. Within classrooms, students were randomly assigned to either the supplemental intervention (treatment) or the specified control condition (i.e., used to control for instructional time and consistency). All instruction in both conditions was delivered by paraeducator tutors and occurred in small groups for approximately 20 min a day, 5 days a week, for 20 weeks (October to April). At posttest, treatment students (n = 93) in the experimental condition significantly outperformed controls (n = 92) on a proximal (i.e., linked directly with the instructional focus of the intervention) measure of root word vocabulary (d = 1.04) and word reading (d = 0.69). Treatment students did not significantly outperform controls on a distal (i.e., not linked directly to the instructional focus of the intervention) measure of reading vocabulary (d = 0.38). The results, practical importance, and limitations are discussed. (Contains 3 tables.)

Purpose: Preschooler instruction for speech sound awareness typically teaches a progression of speech units from sentences to phonemes, ending at simple first phoneme activities. This study investigates the effects of teaching advanced tasks of phoneme blending and segmenting with and without the larger speech unit of the syllable. Method: Thirty-nine 4-5-year-old typically developing children received twice-weekly small-group instruction in three conditions: two weeks of syllable tasks then four weeks of multiple phoneme tasks (SP), four weeks of multiple phoneme tasks only (MP), or an active control condition of first phoneme instruction (FP). Results: The conditions SP and MP showed large significant gains on blending and segmenting and no significant differences on first phoneme isolating compared to the FP condition. A comparison of SP and MP did not show significant differences on phoneme blending and segmenting, but SP showed significantly more confusion during early sessions of phoneme instruction. Conclusion: This preliminary evidence suggests that preschoolers can improve understanding of phoneme blending and segmenting, without first being taught syllable blending and segmenting, and with no negative effects on first sound awareness. These findings support a more efficient way of teaching preschoolers awareness of the individual sounds of speech. Replication with a larger sample, including children at-risk for literacy difficulties, is recommended before firm conclusions should be drawn. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

This study examines the efficacy of "ParentCorps" among 4-year-old children (N = 171) enrolled in prekindergarten in schools in a large urban school district. "ParentCorps" includes a series of 13 group sessions for parents and children held at the school during early evening hours and facilitated by teachers and mental health professionals. "ParentCorps" resulted in significant benefits on effective parenting practices and teacher ratings of child behavior problems in school. Intervention effects were of similar magnitude for families at different levels of risk and for Black and Latino families. The number of sessions attended was related to improvements in parenting. Study findings support investment in and further study of school-based family interventions for children from underserved, urban communities. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

The purpose of this design experiment was to research, test, and iteratively derive principles of word learning and word organization that could help to theoretically advance our understanding of vocabulary development for low-income preschoolers. Six Head Start teachers in morning and afternoon programs and their children (N = 89) were selected to participate in the World of Words, a 12-min daily supplemental vocabulary intervention; six classes (N = 89) served as a comparison group. Our questions addressed whether the difficulty of words influenced the acquisition and retention of words and whether learning words in taxonomies might support vocabulary development and inference generation. We addressed these questions in two design phases for a total intervention period of 16 weeks. Pre- and post-unit assessments measured children's expressive language gains, categorical development, and inference generation. Significant differences were recorded between treatment and comparison groups on word knowledge and category development. Furthermore, children in the treatment group demonstrated the ability to infer beyond what was specifically taught. These results suggest that instructional design features may work to accelerate word learning for low-income children. (Contains 2 notes, 6 tables, and 2 figures.)

We examined the efficacy of 20 weeks of individual supplemental phonics-based instruction for language minority (LM) and non-LM first graders. Students were designated LM if the primary home language was not English (otherwise non-LM). Those performing in the bottom half of their classroom LM/non-LM group in letter knowledge and phonological awareness were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. Treatment included alphabetics, decoding, and oral reading practice. Results showed that treatment students (n = 93) outperformed controls (n = 94) on 5 of the 6 posttests; however, LM students exhibited lower treatment response on passage reading fluency. Pretest word reading did not moderate treatment response, and LM students with greater baseline vocabulary showed greater treatment response on posttest word reading and spelling. (Contains 4 tables and 3 figures.)

This experimental study was designed to validate a short-term supplemental reading intervention for at-risk first-grade children. Although substantial research on long-term supplemental reading interventions exists, less is known about short-term interventions. Thirty first-grade children were randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. Students in the intervention received 16 hours of instruction. Analyses of pre- and posttest data and growth measures suggest that short-term supplemental reading intervention had a significant effect on children's reading skills; however, effects were not consistent across measures. Parent and teacher ratings moderated significant effects. Findings support the validity of a brief intervention for students at risk for reading failure that may inform Tier 2 interventions within a Response to Intervention framework. (Contains 9 tables and 2 figures.)

Much research has established the contribution of summer reading setback to the reading achievement gap that is present between children from more and less economically advantaged families. Likewise, summer reading activity, or the lack of it, has been linked to summer setback. Finally, family socioeconomic status has been linked to the access children have to books in their homes and neighborhoods. Thus, in this longitudinal experimental study we tested the hypothesis that providing elementary school students from low-income families with a supply of self-selected trade books would ameliorate summer reading setback. Thus, 852 students from 17 high-poverty schools were randomly selected to receive a supply of self-selected trade books on the final day of school over a 3-year period, and 478 randomly selected students from these same schools received no books and served as the control group. No further effort was provided in this intervention study. Outcomes on the state reading assessment indicated a statistically significant effect (p = 0.015) for providing access to books for summer reading along with a significant (d = 0.14) effect size. Slightly larger effects (d = 0.21) were found when comparing the achievement of the most economically disadvantaged students in the treatment and control groups. (Contains 3 tables and 2 notes.)

Improving reading rate can be difficult for poor readers. In this experiment, we investigated the impact of improvement in reading rate on other aspects of reading, including word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension. Poor readers in Grades 2 or 4 (N = 123) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: practice reading text at their independent reading level (92%-100% word reading accuracy), practice reading text at a difficult reading level (80%-90% accuracy), or an untreated control. Students in practice conditions read aloud to an adult listener who assisted with difficult words. Before, midway, and following 20 weeks of treatment, we assessed improvement in reading rate, word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension across conditions and determined the impact of improved rate on comprehension. We found significant differences favoring the treatment groups in rate, word recognition, and comprehension, but not in decoding or vocabulary. We found no significant differences in growth between levels of text difficulty. (Contains 8 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper describes a series of school-based randomized trials in over 250 urban schools designed to test the impact of financial incentives on student achievement. In stark contrast to simple economic models, our results suggest that student incentives increase achievement when the rewards are given for inputs to the educational production function, but incentives tied to output are not effective. Relative to popular education reforms of the past few decades, student incentives based on inputs produce similar gains in achievement at lower costs. Qualitative data suggest that incentives for inputs may be more effective because students do not know the educational production function, and thus have little clue how to turn their excitement about rewards into achievement. Several other models, including lack of self-control, complementary inputs in production, or the unpredictability of outputs, are also consistent with the experimental data.

The relative effectiveness of two computer-assisted instructional programs designed to provide instruction and practice in foundational reading skills was examined. First-grade students at risk for reading disabilities received approximately 80 h of small-group instruction in four 50-min sessions per week from October through May. Approximately half of the instruction was delivered by specially trained teachers to prepare students for their work on the computer, and half was delivered by the computer programs. At the end of first grade, there were no differences in student reading performance between students assigned to the different intervention conditions, but the combined-intervention students performed significantly better than control students who had been exposed to their school's normal reading program. Significant differences were obtained for phonemic awareness, phonemic decoding, reading accuracy, rapid automatic naming, and reading comprehension. A follow-up test at the end of second grade showed a similar pattern of differences, although only differences in phonemic awareness, phonemic decoding, and rapid naming remained statistically reliable.

Vocabulary knowledge at school entry is a robust predictor of later reading achievement. Many children begin formal reading instruction at a significant disadvantage due to low levels of vocabulary. Until recently, relatively few research studies examined the efficacy of vocabulary interventions for children in the early primary grades (e.g., before fourth grade), and even fewer addressed vocabulary intervention for students at increased risk for reading failure. In more recent work, researchers have begun to explore ways in which to diminish the "meaningful differences" in language achievement noted among children as they enter formal schooling. This article provides a review of a particularly effective model of vocabulary intervention based on shared storybook reading and situates this model in a context of tiered intervention, an emerging model of instructional design in the field of special education. In addition, we describe a quasi-experimental posttest-only study that examines the feasibility and effectiveness of the model for first-grade students. Participants were 224 first-grade students of whom 98 were identified as at risk for reading disability based on low levels of vocabulary. Results of a multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant differences on measures of target vocabulary knowledge at the receptive and context level, suggesting that students at risk for reading failure benefit significantly from a second tier of vocabulary instruction. Implications for classroom practice as well as future research are provided.

This study investigates the effects of rich explanation, baseline vocabulary, and home reading practices on English language learning (ELL) preschoolers' sophisticated vocabulary learning from storybook reading. Eighty typically developing preschoolers were pretested in L1 (Portuguese) and L2 (English) receptive vocabulary and were assigned to experimental or control groups. Eight books were selected and paired. Experimental participants heard books read three times over a 3-week period with rich explanations of target vocabulary. Controls heard stories read without explanations. Parents completed questionnaires about the frequency, content, and language of home reading practices. Rich explanation, initial L2 vocabulary, and frequency of home reading make significant contributions to sophisticated word learning from storyreading. Findings have important implications for L2 vocabulary acquisition in ELL preschoolers. (Contains 4 tables.)

Contemporary embodiment theory's indexical hypothesis predicts that engaging in text-relevant activity while listening to a story will: (1) enhance memory for enacted story content; and, (2) result in relatively greater memory enhancement for enacted atypical events than for typical ones ([Glenberg and Robertson, 1999] and [Glenberg and Robertson, 2000]). To date, indexical hypothesis predictions and applications have been examined only with adults and elementary school-aged children. The present study extended previous research by comparing an activity-based listening strategy to a listening-only strategy with 56 preschool children. The first hypothesis was supported in that children in the activity-based condition recalled more story actions than children in the listening-only condition. At the same time, this effect was relatively greater for children who were initially better at remembering story content than for initially poorer story rememberers. Consistent with previous research findings, no statistical differences between conditions were observed on memory for nonaction story content. The second hypothesis--that children in the activity-based strategy would exhibit comparatively greater memory enhancement for atypical story events relative to typical ones--was not supported. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed. (Contains 3 tables.)

The District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003, passed by Congress in January 2004, established the first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States. Since that time, more than 8,400 students have applied for what is now called the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), and a rigorous evaluation of the Program, mandated by Congress, has been underway. This last formal report from the ongoing evaluation describes the impacts of the Program at least four years after families who applied and were given the option to move from a public school to a participating private school of their choice. The research priorities for the evaluation were shaped largely by the primary topics of interest specified in the statute. This legislative mandate led the evaluators to focus on the following research questions: (1) What is the impact of the Program on student academic achievement? (2) What is the impact of the Program on other student measures? (3) What effect does the Program have on school safety and satisfaction? (4) What is the effect of attending private versus public schools? (5) To what extent is the Program influencing public schools and expanding choice options for parents in Washington, DC? These research questions are consistent with the topics that scholars and policymakers have identified as important questions of interest surrounding private school scholarship programs. The report found that that the Program had mixed longer-term effects on participating students and their parents, including: (1) No conclusive evidence that the OSP affected student achievement overall, or for the high-priority group of students who applied from "schools in need of improvement"; (2) The Program significantly improved students' chances of graduating from high school, according to parent reports. Overall, 82 percent of students offered scholarships received a high school diploma, compared to 70 percent of those who applied but were not offered scholarships. This graduation rate improvement also held for the subgroup of OSP students who came from "schools in need of improvement."; and (3) Although parents had higher satisfaction and rated schools as safer if their child was offered or used an OSP scholarship, students reported similar ratings for satisfaction and safety regardless of whether they were offered or used a scholarship. Appendices include: (1) Research Methodology; (2) Benjamini-Hochberg Adjustments for Multiple Comparisons; (3) Sensitivity Testing; (4) Relationship Between Attending a Private School and Key Outcomes; (5) Detailed ITT Tables; (6) Exploration of Whether Parents Get What They Seek From School Choice; (7) To What Extent Are Treatment Effects of the OSP Observed Across the Outcome Test-Score Distribution? Quantile Regression Analysis of the OSP; and (8) Intermediate Outcome Measures. (Contains 99 tables, 31 figures, and 61 footnotes.)

This study tested the efficacy of supplemental phonics instruction for 84 low-skilled language minority (LM) kindergarteners and 64 non-LM kindergarteners at 10 urban public schools. Paraeducators were trained to provide the 18-week (January-May) intervention. Students performing in the bottom half of their classroom language group (LM and non-LM) were randomly assigned either to individual supplemental instruction (treatment) or to classroom instruction only (control). Irrespective of their language status, treatment students (n = 67) significantly outperformed controls (n = 81) at posttest in alphabetics, word reading, spelling, passage reading fluency, and comprehension (average treatment d = 0.83); nevertheless, LM students tended to have lower posttest performance than non-LM students (average LM d = -0.30) and were significantly less responsive to treatment on word reading. When we examined the contribution of classroom phonics time to student outcomes, we found that the treatment effect on spelling was greater for students in lower phonics classrooms, whereas the treatment effect on comprehension was greater for those in higher phonics classrooms. Finally, when we examined LM students alone, we found that pretest English receptive vocabulary positively predicted most posttests and interacted with treatment only on phonological awareness. In general, pretest vocabulary did not moderate kindergarten LM treatment response. (Contains 6 tables and 2 figures.)

As an increasing number of studies document the link between the development of student academic and social behavior, there is a growing need to create and evaluate interventions that address both types of skill development in school contexts. It is of particular importance to focus on interventions that improve the learning environment to maximize student success. The Good Behavior Game (TGBG) is an example of a research-based intervention that can be easily modified and implemented in conjunction with academic interventions to maximize effectiveness of student supports. The present study focused on the development and implementation of a modified version of TGBG implemented during the delivery of a secondary level early literacy intervention for students at-risk for reading difficulties. Specifically, this study examined whether instructional assistants' implementation of TGBG was functionally related to changes in student and instructor outcomes. The student outcomes assessed were (1) problem behavior, (2) academic engagement, and (3) pre-literacy skill development. The instructor outcomes assessed were provision of opportunities to respond to instruction, specific praise, and corrective statements for student social behavior. Data were also collected on fidelity of implementation, contextual fit, and social validity of TGBG. A concurrent multiple baseline design across five instructional reading groups was used to evaluate effects of TGBG. Results indicated that TGBG was functionally related to reductions in student problem behavior. In addition, a functional relation was established between implementation of TGBG and increases in instructor provision of specific praise statements and decreases in provision of corrective statements. Academic engagement and provision of opportunities to respond remained high and stable throughout the study. Pre-literacy trajectories did not appear to be functionally related to TGBG implementation; however, this may have been due to the short timeframe of the study. Instructional assistants implementing TGBG as well as students participating in TGBG rated it positively. Conceptual, practical, and future research implications are discussed. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The primary purpose of this study was to explore if there could be a more beneficial method in organizing the individual instructional reading components (phonological decoding, spelling, fluency, and reading comprehension) within a remedial reading program to increase sensitivity to instruction for middle school students with reading disabilities (RD). Three different modules (Alternating, Integrated, and Additive) of the Reading Achievement Multi-Modular Program were implemented with 90 middle school (sixth to eighth grades) students with reading disabilities. Instruction occurred 45 min a day, 5 days a week, for 26 weeks, for approximately 97 h of remedial reading instruction. To assess gains, reading subtests of the Woodcock Johnson-III, the Gray Silent Reading Test, and Oral Reading Fluency passages were administered. Results showed that students in the Additive module outperformed students in the Alternating and Integrated modules on phonological decoding and spelling and students in the Integrated module on comprehension skills. Findings for the two oral reading fluency measures demonstrated a differential pattern of results across modules. Results are discussed in regards to the effect of the organization of each module on the responsiveness of middle school students with RD to instruction.

The purpose of this study was (1) to examine the causal effects of READ 180, a mixed-methods literacy intervention, on measures of word reading efficiency, reading comprehension and vocabulary, and oral reading fluency and (2) to examine whether print exposure among children in the experimental condition explained variance in posttest reading scores. A total of 294 children in Grades 4-6 were randomly assigned to READ 180 or a district after-school program. Both programs were implemented 4 days per week over 23 weeks. Children in the READ 180 intervention participated in three 20-min literacy activities, including (1) individualized computer-assisted reading instruction with videos, leveled text, and word study activities, (2) independent and modeled reading practice with leveled books, and (3) teacher-directed reading lessons tailored to the reading level of children in small groups. Children in the district after-school program participated in a 60-min program in which teachers were able to select from 16 different enrichment activities that were designed to improve student attendance. There was no significant difference between children in READ 180 and the district after-school program on norm-referenced measures of word reading efficiency, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Although READ 180 had a positive impact on oral reading fluency and attendance, these effects were restricted to children in Grade 4. Print exposure, as measured by the number of words children read on the READ 180 computer lessons, explained 4% of the variance in vocabulary and 2% of the variance in word reading efficiency after all pretest reading scores were partialed out.

In 2007, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began implementing a schoolwide reform called the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) using funds from the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) and private foundations. Under the TAP model, teachers can earn extra pay and responsibilities through promotion to mentor or master teacher as well as annual performance bonuses based on a combination of their value added to student achievement and observed performance in the classroom. The idea behind the program is that performance incentives, combined with tools for teachers to track performance and improve instruction, should help schools attract and retain talented teachers and help all teachers produce greater student achievement. This report provides evidence on the impacts of TAP during the 2008-2009 school year, the second year of the program's rollout in CPS. Appended are: (1) Propensity Score Matching; and (2) Longitudinal Analysis of Test Score Data. (Contains 18 tables, 7 figures and 14 footnotes.) [For the Year One Impact Report, see ED507502.]

This study examined the effectiveness of a yearlong, researcher-provided, Tier 2 (secondary) intervention with a group of sixth-graders. The intervention emphasized word recognition, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Participants scored below a proficiency level on their state accountability test and were compared to a similar group of struggling readers receiving school-provided instruction. All students received the benefits of content area teachers who participated in researcher-provided professional development designed to integrate vocabulary and comprehension practices throughout the school day (Tier 1). Students who participated in the Tier 2 intervention showed gains on measures of decoding, fluency, and comprehension, but differences relative to students in the comparison group were small (median d = +0.16). Students who received the researcher-provided intervention scored significantly higher than students who received comparison intervention on measures of word attack, spelling, the state accountability measure, passage comprehension, and phonemic decoding efficiency, although most often in particular subgroups. (Contains 2 tables.)

Direct, explicit, and systematic instruction of critical skills has been a hallmark of effective teaching for many years. In this study, we implemented a quasi-experimental pre-/post-test design with nonequivalent groups to determine the effectiveness of syllable skills instruction on reading achievement. Classes were randomly assigned to control or treatment groups. Participants included middle-school students with high incidence disabilities, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their peers at risk for reading failure. The syllable skills intervention included instruction in syllable patterns, syllabication steps and rules, and accenting patterns. Students practiced skills by decoding and encoding nonsense and low-frequency mono- and multisyllabic words. Statistically significant differences were evident between pre-test and post-test scores for three dependent measures: (a) word identification, (b) word attack, and (c) reading comprehension. The treatment group demonstrated greater increase from pre-test to post-test on word identification, word attack, and reading comprehension; and the gap in fluency performance between the groups decreased. We discuss these outcomes with regard to their implications for practice and future research. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

The "District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003," passed by the Congress in January 2004, established the first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States. The purpose of the new scholarship program was to provide low-income residents, particularly those whose children attend schools in need of improvement or corrective action under the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act," with "expanded opportunities to attend higher performing schools in the District of Columbia" (Sec. 303). As part of this legislation, the Congress mandated a rigorous evaluation of the impacts of the Program, now called the "DC Opportunity Scholarship Program" (OSP). This report presents findings from the evaluation on the impacts three years after families who applied were given the option to move from a public school to a participating private school of their choice. The evaluation is based on a randomized controlled trial design that compares the outcomes of eligible applicants randomly assigned to receive (treatment group) or not receive (control group) a scholarship through a series of lotteries. The main findings of the evaluation so far include: (1) After 3 years, there was a statistically significant positive impact on reading test scores, but not math test scores; (2) The OSP had a positive impact overall on parents' reports of school satisfaction and safety, but not on students' reports; (3) This same pattern of findings holds when the analysis is conducted to determine the impact of using a scholarship rather than being offered a scholarship; (4) The OSP improved reading achievement for 5 of the 10 subgroups examined; and (5) No achievement impacts were observed for five other subgroups of students, including those who entered the Program with relative academic disadvantage. Six appendices are included: (1) Research Methodology; (2) Benjamini-Hochberg Adjustments for Multiple Comparisons; (3) Sensitivity Testing; (4) Detailed ITT Tables; (5) Relationship Between Attending a Private School and Key Outcomes; and (6) Intermediate Outcome Measures.. (Contains 115 footnotes, 15 figures and 129 tables.) [For Executive Summary, see ED504784. For "Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts after Two Years", see ED501696. For "Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts after One Year", see ED497154.]

In this article, we report kindergarten student and teacher outcomes from a quasi-experimental evaluation of The Superkids, a systematic, phonics-based, comprehensive K-2 reading program. We recruited 23 kindergarten teachers to implement The Superkids program from a diverse, yet predominantly ethnic minority, group of classrooms from across the United States. We then employed a precise computerized matching methodology to derive a statistically equivalent comparison group of 20 control teacher