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Below level literacy skills are a major source of course failure, high school dropout, and poor performance in postsecondary education. While research is beginning to emerge about the special needs of striving adolescent readers, little is known about effective interventions aimed at addressing these needs.

To help fill this gap and to provide evidence-based guidance to practitioners, the U.S. Department of Education initiated the Enhanced Reading Opportunities (ERO) study—a demonstration and rigorous evaluation of supplemental literacy programs targeted to ninth-grade students whose reading skills are at least two years below grade level.

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 this randomized controlled study conducted by independent research agencies, MDRC and American Institutes for Research.

The research presented in this report shows that the Reading Apprenticeship® Academic Literacy Course had a positive and statistically significant impact on students’ reading comprehension scores — a 33% improvement over and above what the students would have achieved if they had not had the opportunity to attend the course.

In addition, the course had a positive and statistically significant impact on students’ grade point averages in core academic classes and their performance on state standardized tests.

Read more about Reading Apprenticeship and its research studies.