The authors conducted a cluster-randomized trial to examine the effectiveness of structured teacher adaptations to the implementation of an evidence-based summer literacy program that provided students with (a) books matched to their reading level and interests and (b) teacher scaffolding for summer reading in the form of end-of-year comprehension lessons and materials sent to students’ homes in the summer months. In this study, 27 high-poverty elementary schools (75–100% eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch) were matched by prior reading achievement and poverty level and randomly assigned to one of two implementation conditions: a core treatment condition that directly replicated implementation procedures used in previous experiments, or a core treatment with structured teacher adaptations condition. In the adaptations condition, teachers were organized into grade-level teams around a practical improvement goal and given structured opportunities to use their knowledge, experience, and local data to extend or modify program components for their students and local contexts. Students in the adaptations condition performed 0.12 standard deviation higher on a reading comprehension posttest than students in the core treatment. An implementation analysis suggests that fidelity to core program components was high in both conditions and that teachers in the adaptations condition primarily made changes that extended or modified program procedures and activities in acceptable ways. Adaptations primarily served to increase the level of family engagement and student engagement with summer books. These results suggest that structured teacher adaptations may enhance rather than diminish the effectiveness of an evidence-based summer literacy program.

Research has found that peers influence the academic achievement of children. However, the mechanisms through which peers matter remain underexplored. The present study examined the relationship between peers’ reading skills and children’s own reading skills among 4,215 total second- and third-graders in 294 classrooms across 41 schools. One innovation of the study was the use of social network analysis to directly assess who children reported talking to or seeking help from and whether children who identified peers with stronger reading skills experienced higher reading skills. The results indicated that children on average identified peers with stronger reading skills and the positive association between peer reading skills and children’s own reading achievement was strongest for children with lower initial levels of reading skills. The study has implications for how teachers can leverage the advantages of peers via in-class activities.

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.

Prior research suggests that summer learning loss among low-income children contributes to income-based gaps in achievement and educational attainment. We present results from a randomized experiment of a summer mathematics program conducted in a large, high-poverty urban public school district. Children in the third to ninth grade (N = 263) were randomly assigned to an offer of an online summer mathematics program, the same program plus a free laptop computer, or the control group. Being randomly assigned to the program plus laptop condition caused children to experience significantly higher reported levels of summer home mathematics engagement relative to their peers in the control group. Treatment and control children performed similarly on distal measures of academic achievement. We discuss implications for future research.

To improve the reading comprehension outcomes of children in high-poverty schools, policymakers need to identify reading interventions that show promise of effectiveness at scale. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a low-cost and large-scale summer reading intervention that provided comprehension lessons at the end of the school year and stimulated home-based summer reading routines with narrative and informational books. We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving 59 elementary schools, 463 classrooms, and 6,383 second and third graders and examined outcomes on the North Carolina End-of-Grade (EOG) reading comprehension test administered nine months after the intervention, in the children's third- or fourth-grade year. We found that on this delayed outcome, the treatment had a statistically significant impact on children's reading comprehension, improving performance by .04 SD(standard deviation) overall and .05 SD in high-poverty schools. We also found, in estimates from an instrumental variables analysis, that children's participation in home-based summer book reading routines improved reading comprehension. The cost-effectiveness ratio for the intervention compared favorably to existing compensatory education programs that target high-poverty schools.

This study examines the effects of four types of reading comprehension questions – immediate, non-immediate, summary, and unanswerable questions – that linguistically diverse and predominantly low-income parents asked their fourth graders on children’s text retellings. One-hundred-twenty (N = 120) parent and child dyads participated in a home visit study in which they talked about narrative and informational texts. Moderation analyses indicated that immediate questions and non-immediate questions had a more positive effect on student retellings of an informational text and a narrative text, respectively, for less proficient than more proficient readers. These findings suggest that parents may be able to help their children, particularly less proficient readers, with text memory and text comprehension by asking specific types of questions.

A randomized trial involving 19 elementary schools (K–5) was conducted to replicate and extend two previous experimental studies of the effects of a voluntary summer reading program that provided (a) books matched to students’ reading levels and interests and (b) teacher scaffolding in the form of end-of-year comprehension lessons. Matched schools were randomly assigned to implement one of two lesson types. Within schools, students were randomly assigned to a control condition or one of two treatment conditions: a basic treatment condition replicating procedures used in the previous studies or an enhanced treatment condition that added teacher calls in the summer. During summer vacation, students in the treatment conditions received two lesson books and eight books matched to their reading level and interests. Overall, there were no significant treatment effects, and treatment effects did not differ across lesson type. However, there was a significant interaction between the treatment conditions and poverty measured at the school level. The effects of the treatments were positive for high-poverty schools (Cohen ’ s d = .08 and .11, respectively), defined as schools where 75–100% of the students were receiving free or reduced-price lunch ( FRL ). For moderate poverty schools (45–74% FRL ), the effects of the treatments were negative (Cohen ’ s d = −.11 and −.12, respectively). The results underscore the importance of looking at patterns of treatment effects across different contexts, settings, and populations.

This meta-analysis reviewed research on summer reading interventions conducted in the United States and Canada from 1998 to 2011. The synthesis included 41 classroom- and home- based summer reading interventions, involving children from kindergarten to Grade 8. Compared to control group children, children who participated in classroom interventions, involving teacher-directed literacy lessons, or home interventions, involving child-initiated book reading activities, enjoyed significant improvement on multiple reading outcomes. The magnitude of the treatment effect was positive for summer reading interventions that employed research-based reading instruction and included a majority of low-income children. Sensitivity analyses based on within-study comparisons indicated that summer reading interventions had significantly larger benefits for children from low-income backgrounds than for children from a mix of income backgrounds. The findings highlight the potentially positive impact of classroom- and home-based summer reading interventions on the reading comprehension ability of low- income children.

In this study, 72 secondary English teachers from the Santa Ana Unified School District were randomly assigned to participate in the Pathway Project, a cognitive strategies approach to teaching interpretive reading and analytical writing, or to a control condition involving typical district training focusing on teaching content from the textbook. Pathway teachers learned how to use an on-demand writing assessment to help mainstreamed English learners understand, interpret, and write analytical essays. In Year 2, treatment effects were replicated on an on-demand writing assessment (d = .67) and showed evidence of transfer to improved performance on a standardized writing test (d = .10). The results underscore the efficacy of a cognitive strategies reading/writing intervention for mainstreamed ELs in the secondary grades.

This article describes 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, we generated intention-to-treat (ITT) and treatment-on-the-treated (TOT) 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 = .23) and reading comprehension (d = .32), but not on spelling and oral reading fluency. We interpret the findings in light of the theory of instruction underpinning the READ 180 Enterprise intervention.

This study reports year 1 findings from a multi-site 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. 103 English teachers were 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 hours 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 = .35) and the California Standards Test in English Language Arts (d = .07).

This chapter addresses an important issue for education policymakers and practitioners in the United States. The question we ask is whether socioeconomic differences in reading achievement can be reduced by programs that encourage silent reading in the summer months.1 In the years following school entry, children of low socioeconomic status (SES) lose ground in reading relative to their high-SES counterparts. This widening achievement gap may be largely the result of different rates of learning during the summer months (e.g., Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2001; Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996; Heyns, 1978). Even small differences in summer learning can accumulate across years resulting in a substantially greater achievement gap at the end of elementary school than was present at the beginning (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2004; see also Borman & Dowling, 2006; Lai, McNaughton, Amituanai- Toloa, Turner, & Hsiao, 2009).

The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention with and without a parent training component were evaluated with a sample of low-income Latino children from language minority families. During the last month of fourth-grade, 370 children were pretested on a measure of reading comprehension and vocabulary and randomly assigned to (1) a treatment group in which children received 10 self-selected books during summer vacation, (2) a family literacy group in which children received 10 self-selected books and were invited with their parents to attend 3 2- hour summer literacy events, and (3) a control group. Although children in the treatment group and family literacy group reported reading more books than the control group, there was no significant effect on reading comprehension and vocabulary. Recommendations for improving the efficacy of the intervention are discussed, including efforts to improve the match between reader ability and the readability of texts and the instructional goals of the family literacy events.

This paper has three goals. First, it describes the broader research on summer reading loss. Second, it discusses how research and development efforts informed the key components of Project READS (Reading Enhances Achievement During Summer), a scaffolded voluntary summer reading intervention for children in grades 3 to 5. The second part of the paper also describes results from four randomized experiments, which provide rigorous evidence on the efficacy of the READS logic model. Third, it concludes with a checklist to guide districts and schools interested in implementing and evaluating a scaffolded voluntary summer reading program like Project READS.

Randomized field trials were used to examine the impact of the Teacher Study Group (TSG), a professional development model, on first grade teachers’ reading comprehension and vocabulary instruction, their knowledge of these areas, and on the comprehension and vocabulary achievement of their students. The multi-site study was conducted in three large urban school districts from three states. A total of 81 first grade teachers and their 468 students from 19 Reading First schools formed the analytic sample in the study. Classrooms observations of teaching practice showed significant improvements in TSG schools. TSG teachers also significantly outperformed control teachers on the teacher knowledge measure of vocabulary instruction. Confirmatory analysis of student outcomes indicated marginally significant effects in oral vocabulary.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), every school is subject to the controversial mandates for annual test score gains contained in the federal law. The law represents a profound change in the relationship between the federal government and state and local education agencies regarding who controls education and has direct implications for what happens educationally in schools and classrooms. Although NCLB affects these and other important areas of the educational system and imposes great pressure on school leaders, it is silent on the role of principals in fostering school improvement. Yet many of NCLB's provisions have important implications for principals. The law is based on the assumption that external accountability and the imposition of sanctions will force schools to improve and motivate teachers to change their instructional practices, resulting in better school performance. By relying on the threat of sanctions and market mechanisms--choice and supplemental educational services--to force school improvement, the law tends to place the principals of low-achieving schools in the role of trying to produce very large gains every year for every subgroup of students. In this article, the authors highlight the contradictions and oversimplifications in the existing law. They also discuss the findings of a teacher survey which they conducted to understand teachers' views of the assumptions underlying NCLB and the implications of these findings for principals.