Pacesetting high schools, middle grades schools and technology centers have changed classroom and other practices to prepare students to meet postsecondary requirements and rising workplace needs. The strategies include raising expectations, project-based learning, guidance and advisement, improving students' reading and writing skills,…

Evidence indicates that secondary level students are not making adequate reading progress to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) by 2013-2014. According to The Education Trust, reading skills of African American and Latino high school seniors are not commensurate with the reading skills of white middle school students. The 2005…

Describes collaborative efforts by the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd and secondary teachers and administrators in California to develop and implement an interactive approach to reading improvement called Reading Apprenticeship in an effort to help adolescent readers break through the "literacy ceiling" in all their subject area…

Describes how idea mapping proved to be a helpful strategy for hearing-impaired and deaf students considered to have reading disabilities. Shows how it proved to be a valuable tool for students to understand text more effectively and become more independent in their learning processes. (SR)

Discusses the use of a "reflection guide" designed to help students increase their comprehension and recall of a textbook chapter. Notes that the guide is especially useful if students are asked to read a chapter to obtain background for a class discussion. Includes a sample completed reflection guide. (RS)

A Catholic school program designed to improve reading had the most effect on boys. Possible reasons included explicit teaching, demonstration of the practical value of reading, highly structured lessons, worksheets, award certificates, and encouragement to read nonfiction. (SK)

One of the programs included in "Effective Reading Programs...," this program is designed for those students who are reading below grade level. The program serves 500 ninth-grade students from a residential area of a large city. The students are predominantly white and from middle-income families. The objective of the course is to…

Describes a resource teacher's efforts to implement a program to improve reading at the secondary level in a Florida school. Offers activities used in the program. (FL)

Describes a number of ghost stories from American cultures, all of which, despite their different origins, seek to stimulate horror, escapism, and fantastic pleasure. Suggests that the stories may be used to improve reading and writing and incorporate "rainbow" themes in the classroom. (TB)

Explains how students who have difficulty remembering what they have read may be taught how to reread sections of text by suggesting to them that reading is analogous to watching a video with the remote control in hand. (TB)

Describes a classroom-based research project that investigated how talking and writing about the novel "Sarah, Plain and Tall" (by Patricia MacLachlan) and rereading parts as a group helped four deaf teenagers build meaning and broaden their understanding of the story. (SR)

Describes how English teachers of grades 6-12 in one high school have given more direct instruction in the explicit strategies students should use when reading. These strategies, combined with frequent opportunities for students to reflect on their effectiveness on integrating these strategies into their reading processes, resulted in more…

Addressing the question of how schools and teachers can foster an advanced level of reading awareness among secondary students, this paper focuses on the similarity in language used to describe recent research on both the composing process and comprehension as acts of constructing meaning. It presents a perspective on the reading/writing…

Describes a method of using writing to improve high school students' reading skills. (AEA)

Describes the linguistic approach for improving science vocabulary skills. Its efficiency lies in the fact that mastery of a relatively small number of prefixes, suffixes, and word roots unlocks a vast treasure of scientific terminology. (Author/SK)