• COACHING OF TEACHERS FOUND TO BOOST STUDENT READING

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    Coaching of Teachers Found to Boost Student

    Reading

    An innovative study of 17 schools along the East Coast of the US suggests that putting literacy coaches in schools can help boost students’ reading skills by as much as 32 percent over three years.

    The study focused on the Literacy Collaborative, a program developed by researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus. Used in more than 700 schools nationwide, the program trains teachers to become literacy coaches, who then work one-on-one with their colleagues on a half-time basis to spread a set of teaching routines drawn from principles of cognitive science.

    Teachers in Literacy Collaborative classrooms might, for example, help walk students through decoding processes as they read aloud or lead children in groups as they read progressively more-difficult texts.

    The researchers tracked the implementation of the program in K-2 classroom in 17 schools. The total number of 8,520 students included in the study represented a mix of social and economic characteristics.

    To calculate the program’s learning impact, the researchers used value-added techniques to compare students’ progress on various reading-related tests and tasks with how much students would have been expected to gain on those measures with more-typical instruction.

    They found that students’ reading skills grew 16 percent beyond predicted levels the first year, 28 percent more than expected by the second year, and 32 percent more than predicted by the third year.

    (Based on an article in Education Week, published online on 4 May 2010)

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    Categories: Issue II