about the project

RAISE is a five-year effort funded by the U.S. Department of Education to support large-scale dissemination of Reading Apprenticeship discipline-specific professional development.

RAISE will reach more than 2,800 high school subject area teachers and over 400,000 students in five states (California, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Utah).

RAISE is both a larger and more intensive model of successful Reading Apprenticeship interventions already studied. In those federally funded, randomized controlled studies, students were exposed to Reading Apprenticeship in a single course. RAISE is designed to triple a student's exposure to Reading Apprenticeship.

In the RAISE model, students in a participating school are exposed to Reading Apprenticeship as freshmen in their English course, as sophomores in biology, and as juniors in U.S. history.

Evaluation of the project includes a randomized controlled study to investigate the efficacy of the Reading Apprenticeship approach and a mixed-methods study to illuminate implementation issues in a "scale-up" of this magnitude and complexity.

In a subset of the 300-plus participating schools, the randomized controlled study will assess the impact of the school-based "increased dosage" model on students' academic engagement and achievement.

Ruth Schoenbach and Cynthia Greenleaf, Co-Directors of the Strategic Literacy Initiative, direct the RAISE project.

Read the research study description.