This project estimates the cumulative impact of a four-year high school intensive literacy program that uses different means of teacher support aimed at students who begin far below grade level. The literacy program builds upon a key component of the Talent Development high school reform model developed at Johns Hopkins University and focuses on reading fluency and comprehension and writing processes for different goals. The program greatly expands the instruction time for literacy and features learning activities such as teacher modeling, focused mini-lessons, cooperative student team discussions, and self-selected reading. Longitudinal samples from nine participating high schools and nine matched control sites will be initiated each year of the study, with two of the five samples eventually covering all four high school grades with estimated final student samples of 2760 in treatment sites and 2760 in control sites in each case. Support for teachers will be varied in four ways, with an evaluation of one variation each project year of impacts on classroom practice and student achievement gains. Teacher support will vary by specificity and completeness of classroom materials, coverage of subject-specific literacy by English and content teachers, assessments of students for differentiated placements in courses or within-class assignments, and intensity of time and peer-coaching assistance. The significance will be knowledge of how much literacy gaps can be narrowed and closed by intensive interventions with different supports for teachers.
