READi (Reading, Evidence, and Argumentation in Disciplinary Instruction)

Methodologies: Case Study, Descriptive, Experimental, Quasi-Experimental

READi (Reading, Evidence, and Argumentation in Disciplinary Instruction) will show what kind of student performances or products represent "reading for understanding," as defined by the project, in history, science, and English literature developmentally across grades 6-12.

The READi research team defines "reading for understanding" as the capacity to engage in evidence-based argumentation that draws on multiple text sources — within a discipline.

The Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) at WestEd is collaborating with researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and elsewhere, to understand the cognitive processes students will need to draw on in the course of developing evidence-based arguments, to design the instructional interventions that will support students, and to design research studies to measure the efficacy of the project interventions.

Research Questions

Different research questions and methodologies focus the project during three phases of work: cognitive, intervention development, and efficacy.

Basic Cognitive Studies

• What skills and processes do students engage in when building text representations from multiple sources?
• What kinds of task supports (instructions, examples, feedback) promote effective task interpretation?
• What are the criteria for "optimal" effectiveness across knowledge, skill, age, and disposition levels across the grades?

Intervention Development Studies

• What instructional materials, formative assessments, and teacher professional development tools and materials to promote evidence-based argumentation are indicated by analysis of classroom observations where state-of-the-art disciplinary literacy practices are already in place?

Efficacy Studies

• Do students enrolled in the classrooms of teachers who use READi-designed student materials and scaffolding tools exhibit greater improvements in reading proficiency than their counterparts in control classrooms?
• With what fidelity do teachers implement the READi-designed materials?

Methodology

Basic Cognitive Studies

To test the effects of the text and task manipulations on comprehension outcomes, intact sixth, ninth, and twelfth grade classrooms will be randomly assigned to the various text and task manipulations. Construction of text sets and tasks will be informed by hypothesized learning progressions in each disciplinary area, and observations of existing approaches to disciplinary literacy.

In addition to task performance assessments, measures include process assessment, clinical interviews, RSAT (Reading Strategy Assessment Tool), and Read & Answer, a computer-based research tool that tracks what text and task information students examine; surveys about reader attributes in regard to such topics as domain knowledge, interest, metacognitive awareness, and self-efficacy.

Intervention Development Studies

Observational studies of existing approaches to disciplinary literacy instruction will jump-start rapid prototyping of the READi-designed instructional materials. In addition, a 15-month, mixed-method longitudinal study will be undertaken with a subset of low-income African American students in order to understand how cognitive and psycho-social processes develop over time in the disciplinary context of English literature. Analyses will focus on the relationship between youth's perceptions of cultural identity and socialization, school climate, and reading performance across time. This study will provide information about the kinds of instruction that seem to help students whose struggles with school performance are not primarily due to poor academic skill.

Beginning in year 1, concurrent, multiple, design-based studies in classrooms will be used to iteratively design and refine the READi instructional materials. Surveys of student engagement, classroom artifacts, classroom observations, teacher interviews, and student interviews will be used to inform the development and refinement of the instructional materials. Professional learning communities will be established in the participating schools to support development and implementation activities. The team will also develop a software tool called SenseMaker designed to provide student workspaces that can be used individually or collaboratively to help them in interpreting tasks, activating prior knowledge, and constructing knowledge to facilitate evidence-based argumentation.

Twenty-one instructional units will be created, one for each grade in each of the three content areas. The fully developed units and SenseMaker tool will be piloted to determine whether they are working as intended to improve students' reading for understanding, content knowledge, vocabulary and academic language, participation in evidence-based argument, discourse, text-based problem-solving strategies, engagement, motivation, and self-efficacy in academic tasks. A key issue in these studies is to determine the cumulative effect of experiencing multiple READi-designed instructional units.

Efficacy Studies

Final versions of the interventions will be tested in middle and high school classrooms using a cluster-randomized design in years 4 and 5, with randomization at the teacher level. Two efficacy studies will be completed, each focused on a particular curriculum unit or module. Studies will examine whether students enrolled in the classrooms of teachers who use the READi-designed units and scaffolding tools exhibit greater improvements in reading proficiency than their counterparts in control classrooms.

The research team will also explore how evidence of impact varies as a function of the nature of the outcome measure used and its conceptual and construct overlap with the theory guiding the intervention design. Outcome measures will include standardized measures of English language arts, the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE), the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory, and the Metacomprehension Scale, as well as assessments developed by the Reading for Understanding Assessment Team. Fidelity of implementation will be assessed using classroom observations, lesson logs, and instructional artifacts.

Key Findings or Outcomes

Complete study findings will be available at the end of the five-year project, in 2015.

Contact Information

Cynthia Greenleaf
510.302.4222
cgreenl@wested.org