Washington Striving Readers: Year 1 Evaluation Report
Author: Deussen, Theresa
Date: 2012-06-30
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Grants,Reading Instruction,Middle School Students,High School Students,Literacy,Scientific Research,Federal Aid,State Departments of Education,Competition,Program Development,Program Implementation,School Districts,Control Groups,Faculty Development,Reading Tests,Scores,Regression (Statistics),Reading Achievement,Achievement Gains,Statistical Significance,Program Effectiveness

In 2009, the United States Department of Education conducted a competition for a second round of Striving Readers grants. Its dual purpose was to: (1) Raise middle and high school students' literacy levels in Title I-eligible schools with significant numbers of students reading below grade level; and (2) Build a strong, scientific research base for identifying and replicating strategies that improve adolescent literacy skills through a required experimental study design. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), Washington's state education agency, joined together with evaluators at Education Northwest to submit a proposal for the competition. Washington state was one of just eight states to be awarded Striving Readers grants in the second round. The grant originally included a planning year, followed by three years of implementation in selected schools. However, Congress eliminated the funding for the program in spring 2011, three-quarters of the way through the first year of implementation. Existing funding was sufficient to complete the first year of program implementation and data collection, but the second and third years of implementation did not take place. Therefore, this Year 1 evaluation report is the only report about the program's implementation and outcomes. Five schools from three districts in Western Washington participated in Washington Striving Readers. Across the five schools, a total of 176 students participated in the treatment condition and 182 students were in the control condition. The program offered 70 hours of professional development for teachers, and all teachers participated in at least 90 percent of these offerings. All teachers also received the intended amount of in-class support, defined as at least 12 visits from a project coach with each visit lasting at least one hour. The study examined four aspects of program implementation: teachers' receipt of the intended professional development, their receipt of in-class coaching, their delivery of the programs as intended, and the completion of all the lessons that were supposed to be covered. Researchers used three different assessments to measure impact: (1) &quot;Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test&quot;; (2) two subtests from the &quot;Woodcock Reading Mastery&quot; assessment--the word attack and word identification subtests; and (3) scores from the &quot;Measure of Student Progress&quot; (&quot;MSP&quot;). Researchers examined the overall impact of Washington Striving Readers using a fixed effects regression model that accounted for the random assignment of students within schools and groups. The findings demonstrated that it is possible to make a statistically significant difference in struggling students' overall literacy achievement in the course of one school year. Students in the Washington Striving Readers intervention performed better on the state reading assessment than did students in the control condition, who did not receive any supplemental reading support. The following are appended: (1) Washington Striving Readers Implementation Measures; (2) Baseline Equivalence of Treatment and Control Groups; and (3) Detailed Regression Analysis Results.