RAISE was 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 reached more than 1,900 high school subject area teachers and over 560,000 students in five states (California, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Utah).
RAISE was both a larger and more intensive model of successful Reading Apprenticeship interventions already studied. In those federally funded, randomized controlled studies, students experienced Reading Apprenticeship in a single course. RAISE was designed to triple a student’s experience with Reading Apprenticeship.
In the RAISE model, students in a participating school experienced Reading Apprenticeship as freshmen in their English course, as sophomores in biology, and as juniors in U.S. history.
Evaluation of the project included 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 assessed the impact of the school-based “increased dosage” model on students’ academic engagement and achievement.
Ruth Schoenbach and Cynthia Greenleaf, former Co-Directors of the Strategic Literacy Initiative, directed the RAISE project.