Nationally, two-thirds of high school students are unable to read and comprehend complex academic materials, think critically about texts, and synthesize information from multiple sources, or communicate what they have learned. Without a substantial change in their academic literacy, U.S. high school students face continued academic problems in…

The Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework was developed by WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) two decades ago to help teachers provide the literacy support students need to be successful readers in the content areas. It has since reached over 100,000 teachers in schools across the country, at the middle school, high school, and…

A 2-year, randomized control trial with 9th to 10th grade students with significant reading problems was provided for 50 minutes a day in small groups. Comparison students were provided an elective class and treatment students the reading intervention. Students were identified as demonstrating reading difficulties through failure on their state…

Empirical Education Inc. is the independent evaluator of WestEd's 2012 i3 Development grant for Internet-based Reading Apprenticeship Improving Science Education (iRAISE). This interim report provides an update on the progress of the randomized control trial (RCT) during the 2014-2015 school year. The RCT measures the impact of iRAISE on student…

This paper reviews best practices for effective adolescent literacy programs. A focus is placed on five areas of literacy instruction including word study, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and motivation. Each of these areas is discussed as well as how each area is relevant to reading and understanding narrative and content-area text at high…

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education issued a request for proposals (RFP) for programs to improve adolescent literacy. The Department's stated goal was to improve the performance of struggling adolescent readers and help build a strong scientific research base around specific strategies to help…

In October 2010, WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) won an i3 "Validation" grant to scale up and validate the Reading Apprenticeship (RA) model in three core secondary content area classes: U.S. history, biology, and English language arts. SLI's proposal stated two goals. Goal 1: To transform academic literacy teaching and…

This brief describes a quasi-experimental study of Word Generation, conducted in public middle schools in Boston. Word Generation is a robust vocabulary intervention that is implemented across key subject areas. The purpose of the program is to enhance students' vocabulary in support of improved reading comprehension. The brief outlines the…

With the number of alternative pathways now available for entry into Australian universities, the number of international students is steadily increasing. This article reports on the undergraduate results of a teaching project at the University of Canberra, Australia, and explored whether the introduction of a discipline-based reading program into…

This paper describes a comprehensive set of studies designed to assess the potential for commercial reading programs to teach reading in science. Specific questions focus on the proportion of selections in the programs that contain science and the amount of science that is in those selections, on the genres in which the science is portrayed, on…

The main objective of this action research is to explore the effectiveness of blogs to promote frequent extra reading practice in a freshman EFL science and technology reading program at a public university. Sociocultural theory and the revival of Vygostky's constructivism have made us rethink how to approach the learning-teaching process in the…

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…

Provides seven recommendations for an effective secondary reading program that will treat reading as a body of skills taught in all subject areas. (MKM)

Describes Project READ:S (Reading Education Accountability Design: Secondary) designed to encourage teachers to adopt more effective techniques of presenting printed materials. Uses authoring diskettes to enable teachers to produce textbook comprehension modules (reading guides) to accompany the student throughout the reading process and assist in…

Noting the increasing recognition being given to the importance of content area reading, this paper describes an inservice education program designed for content area secondary school teachers in the Fort Wayne, Indiana, school system as a possible model for other school districts to adopt. The first section of the paper describes the program,…