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Support for this research was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Stuart Foundations. Support for the ongoing professional development activities of SLI was also provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Stuart Foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the W. Clement & Jessie V. Stone Foundation, the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, the Flora Family Foundation, and the Stupski Family Foundation.

The purpose of the Reading Apprenticeship® (RA) Classroom Study was to learn how teachers who participated in inquiry-based professional development incorporated Reading Apprenticeship approaches into their subject-area instruction, and how these literacy experiences in turn affected student reading achievement and engagement.

In this research study, SLI researchers took an in-depth look at teacher learning, classroom practice, and student learning in eleven middle and high school classrooms to address the following set of questions:

• What literacy experiences are offered to students in classrooms of secondary teachers who are attempting to integrate reading instruction into their ongoing subject-area teaching?
• What difficulties and successes do these teachers experience and what professional development experiences, activities, and resources are most helpful to them?
• How do the literacy learning opportunities offered by these teachers affect students' reading development and subject-area learning?

Findings from Student Case Studies in High Implementation Reading Apprenticeship Classrooms (2001-2003 data)

1. Many students hold conceptions of reading and of their own capacity, based on experiences in school, that do not serve them well. For instance, that
   • reading is merely saying the words
   • reading should be effortless
   • reading is boring
   • reading is for testing, not teaching or learning
   • reading is solely a school-based activity, disconnected from their literacy practices outside of school
2. Many students are profoundly inexperienced with academic reading and literacy tasks, as they demonstrated in dynamic reading assessments, showing:
   • unfamiliarity with the world referenced by the text
   • unfamiliarity with how to work with unknown words
   • unfamiliarity with how academic language works
     • Syntax
     • Text features
     • Graphics and illustrations
3. Despite students' (mis)conceptions and inexperience, in one-on-one interviews and in classroom reading tasks, students repeatedly demonstrated the ability and stamina to marshal a wide range of cognitive strategies, and to grapple with and think through perplexing comprehension problems, showing a great deal of potential and promise.
4. In Reading Apprenticeship classrooms where students had ongoing opportunities to be mentored in the reading and thinking processes of the disciplines, we witnessed profound shifts in students' conceptions of reading, reading practices, and identities as readers and students.
5. In these classrooms, metacognitive literacy routines provided ongoing opportunities for students to interact with the teacher and their classmates in order to reach fuller understandings of disciplinary concepts and literacy processes.
6. Frequently, these shifts in strategy, agency, ownership, and identity were accompanied by improved course grades, decisions to take additional academic classes, and score increases on standardized tests of reading comprehension.
7. Based on preliminary data, when students have more than one Reading Apprenticeship teacher in the same year or over two years, the impact appears to be more pronounced.

Analyses from this study of Reading Apprenticeship classrooms confirm earlier findings: that students make impressive gains in reading achievement, closing the performance gap as they make substantially more than a year's growth during a single academic year. Students in all performance quartiles benefit from Reading Apprenticeship instruction, as do English Learners.

Read the full study (PDF)