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 disciplinary literacy professional development.

RAISE will reach more than 2,500 high school content teachers and over 400,000 students in five states (California, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Utah). In process are a randomized controlled study to investigate the efficacy of the Reading Apprenticeship approach and a mixed-methods study focused on issues involved in an implementation of this magnitude.

In three previous randomized controlled studies of the Reading Apprenticeship approach, high school students with exposure to Reading Apprenticeship in a single course — biology, U.S. history, or grade 9 academic literacy — made significant literacy and content knowledge gains, as well as gains related to motivation and academic identity.

RAISE is both a larger and more intensive version of the Reading Apprenticeship interventions already studied. It is designed to amplify a student's exposure to Reading Apprenticeship through a school-based model.

At each site, teachers in multiple disciplines integrate Reading Apprenticeship practices into their teaching. Students, therefore, are exposed to Reading Apprenticeship in up to three successive years: English language arts in grade 9, biology in grade 10, and U.S. history in grade 11.

In a subset of the 300+ participating schools, a randomized controlled study will assess the impact of this "increased dosage" on students' engagement and academic achievement.

A second focus of the research is a "scale-up" study, designed to illuminate issues of fidelity and capacity building when a complex professional development-based intervention is implemented on a large scale. The scale-up effort is a partnership between the Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) (developer of Reading Apprenticeship) at WestEd and local education agencies in the five states that will collaborate with SLI to support and further disseminate Reading Apprenticeship during the grant period.

Ruth Schoenbach and Cynthia Greenleaf, SLI Co-Directors, are Co-Managers of RAISE.