Adolescent Literacy

Academic Language Development

Addressing a concern raised by Boston Public Schools (BPS) in 2005, SERP has been focused for more than a decade on ways to support the development of academic language— also known as "the language of school." SERP's collaboration with BPS led to the development of a simple interdisciplinary instructional intervention for middle schools to better prepare students for high school texts. The program, Word Generation, was developed in collaboration with faculty from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and is now downloaded by schools in all 50 states and more than 50 countries. Word Generation has been extended downward to 4th and 5th grades, and content units for middle grades social studies and science have been developed. An assessment of academic language knowledge has been developed and validated by HGSE faculty.

Lead Researcher: Catherine Snow, Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Student-level Reading Profiles

At the start of the SERP partnership, Boston Public Schools leaders expressed frustration with middle grades reading assessments: available assessments could either be administered to an entire class with results reported that were inadequately detailed, or detail could be provided with a one-on-one assessment that was resource prohibitive. SERP collaborated with John Sabatini and the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to develop the RISE (Reading Inventory and Scholastic Evaluation) assessment (now the Capti Assess with ETS ReadBasix ™ web-based reading assessment). This assessment was designed to be administered in under 60 minutes and to provide detailed profiles not typically available with class-administered standardized tests.


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Struggling Readers

Assessment scores identified a substantial number of middle school students (one-quarter to one-third in some schools) who still struggle with basic reading skills. The Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention (STARI) was designed in collaboration with Boston area districts to allow students to meet credit requirements for English courses at the same time that it provides specialized and comprehensive remediation. Materials are highly engaging and appeal to the emerging capacity of adolescents to think deeply about important social issues.


Lead Researcher: Lowry Hemphill, Wheelock College


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Catalyzing Comprehension through Discussion and Debate

A grant awarded to SERP by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) as part of the Reading for Understanding Initiative allowed a SERP partnership team to develop measurement instruments and conduct research on the development of perspective taking, critical reasoning, and academic language for students in grades 4-8, and to study the independent contribution of each factor to reading comprehension. Working with practitioners in districts from Massachusetts, Maryland, and California, the team developed or extended instructional programs and programs of professional development.

Co-investigators: Suzanne Donovan, SERP; Catherine Snow, James Kim, Stephanie Jones, Robert Selman, Paola Uccelli, Kurt Fischer, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Jonathan Osborne, Stanford University; Lowry Hemphill, Wheelock College

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