Literacy

This report, commissioned by the California Teachers Association’s (CTA) High School Restructuring Task Force and authored by WestEd, synthesizes the major initiatives on high school reform taking place nationally and in California. The publication provides: 1) clear synthesis of the problem and context; 2) research on high-performing high schools, comprehensive school reform models, and the barriers to improvement; 3) current reform proposals and their research base; and 4) suggestions for further discussion and exploration by CTA.

The Alliance for Excellent Education conducted a meta-analysis on 11 research-based practices aimed at improving the writing skills of fourth to 12th graders. The practices are: (1) writing strategies, (2) summarization, (3) collaborative writing, (4) specific product goals, (5) word processing, (6) sentence combining, (7) prewriting, (8) inquiry activities, (9) process writing approach, (10) study of models, and (11) writing for content learning. The results of the meta-analyses indicate that the practices examined had a large to medium effect size on students’ writing skills.

This report from ACT, Inc., recommends that considerable experience with complex reading texts in high school is the key to the development of college-level reading skills, and is the clearest differentiator of students who are ready for the post-secondary world of college and/or work versus those who are not. The report also defines the types of materials that need to be included in all high school courses, and offers recommendations to educators and policymakers on how to help increase the number of high school graduates who are ready for college-level reading.

This study by Dr. Minda Aguhob of Scholastic Research & Validation examined the effects of READ 180 in high schools in Seminole County Public Schools. Researchers randomly assigned almost 300 9th and 10th grade students in 7 high schools to 12 READ 180 classrooms. Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) Reading assessment results showed that after 6 months, 25% of READ 180 students showed an increase of at least one reading level. White students achieved greater gains than other racial subgroups; there were no significant differences by gender or socioeconomic status.

This matched quasi-experimental study compared 9th- and 10th-grade students in 2003–04 and 2004–05 who received READ 180 with students who did not receive the program. Overall, Read 180 students significantly outperformed their counterparts on reading tests. Further, subgroup analyses found that English language learner (ELL) READ 180 students performed better than an ELL comparison group on reading achievement.