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A national panel of literacy experts selected WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy Course as one of only two ninth-grade reading interventions to be evaluated in a rigorous national study funded by the U.S. Department of Education. To qualify for the project, adolescent literacy projects were required to focus instruction in the following areas: student motivation and engagement; reading fluency; vocabulary; comprehension; advanced phonics and phonemic awareness; and writing. This report presents findings from the second year of program implementation in the 34 schools nationwide participating in this randomized controlled study.

The early findings, reported here, demonstrate that the Reading Apprenticeship 9th Grade Academic Literacy Course had a positive and statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension scores. The Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy program improved reading comprehension test scores by 1.4 standard score points and this impact was statistically significant (p <.015).

The impact of 1.4 points on reading comprehension test scores represents a 33 percent improvement over and above what the Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy students would have achieved if they had not had the opportunity to attend the intervention course.