Many high schools in the United States are contending with modest student writing achievement and looking for ways to enhance teachers' writing instruction. This is especially the case for schools deemed to be "underperforming" and struggling to reform writing pedagogy against an accumulation of teacher and leadership turnover, limited…

Inequitable learning opportunities are a leading contributor to the persistent literacy achievement gaps evident between historically marginalized students and their more affluent peers. This study investigated the impact of a community school reform effort in an urban middle school. The community school initiative focused on meeting the complex…

In recent decades, a growing dependence on digital forms of communication has brought with it exciting visions of the potential for technology to support learning. This report aims to explore the potential role of technology in addressing the gender and disadvantage gap in young people's literacy attitudes and outcomes. It combines insights from a…

As struggling Australian students may not typically receive additional support beyond the mainstream English classroom, more needs to be understood about the staffing and resourcing challenges that may impede secondary English teachers seeking to support these students. Data from the 2019 "Supporting Struggling Secondary Literacy…

This study explores older adolescents' linguistic resources, specifically academic vocabulary knowledge, in the context of factors that can impact their academic success and risk of dropping out of school. The data resulted from a collaboration among professional development personnel, teachers, and university researchers. Eleventh and twelfth…

This study reports findings from a multisite cluster randomized controlled trial designed to validate and scale up an existing successful professional development program that uses a cognitive strategies approach to text-based analytical writing. The Pathway to Academic Success Project worked with partner districts affiliated with 4 National…

The lament that "students can't write" remains loud and defiant, even after years of research pointing to the myriad factors that make students' writing challenging, particularly when they move into university. This paper reports on a longitudinal, ethnographic study which explored students' writing "in transition," from…

Many of the more than 700,000 students who leave U.S. high schools each year without a diploma have low literacy skills. More than 60 percent of eighth graders and 60 percent of twelfth graders scored below the "proficient" level in reading achievement according to the most recent administrations of the National Assessment of Educational…

Background: Despite much discussion on the role of education policy on school and student performance, we know little about the effects of school spending at the margin on student cognitive achievement beyond the effects of class size. Purpose: The paper examines the effects of annual ninth grade classroom hours in literacy and maths on ninth…

A yearlong classroom-based intervention was designed to explore the reading-writing connection in second-language literacy by examining whether the development of reading improves writing and vice versa. Middle school learners of English as a foreign language (N = 300) in South Korea were assigned to three treatments that involved extensive…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested in the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) as one strategy to support teachers' and students' transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts. This report provides an early look at the implementation of LDC in eighth-grade history/social studies and science classes in two…

For their 57th annual conference, the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers (ALER) met in Dallas, Texas at Addison Marriott Quorum by the Galleria. This year's conference theme was Exploring the World of Literacy, which was also used as the title for this year's Yearbook, Volume 36. Included are double-peer reviewed papers,…

More high school students today are graduating college-ready, career-ready or both, thanks to an emphasis by modern business and industry, strong support from states and more rigorous learning experiences at schools across the nation. It has been said many times, but now it is sinking in. From hospitals to factories, employees need to know how to…

Adolescent literacy, or adolescents' ability to read, write, and communicate about the variety of texts they encounter in and out of school, has remained inordinately, and consistently, low for the past 20 years (NCES, 2010). Self-efficacy is a widely-used construct for measuring and predicting student achievement (Pajares, Johnson, & Usher,…

This is the second publication in the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) Project Plus series. Project Plus aims to inform questions of policy and practice by synthesising findings of educational interest from projects funded by the TLRI. This Project Plus focuses on literacy in the early childhood education (ECE) and school…