Evaluation of Accelerating Literacy Through Self-Regulation, Collaboration, and Persistence: Reading Apprenticeship North Carolina | Final Report

Abstract

Nationally, adolescent reading performance has continued to decline, even as younger students have begun to regain lost ground. Concern about adolescent reading performance is particularly acute in North Carolina, which has one of the nation’s largest rural/nonrural gaps, with rural districts reporting lower grade 8 English language arts (ELA) scores and five-year graduation rates than nonrural districts.  

To address these disparities, in 2021, WestEd received a six-year Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Mid-phase grant (which included a one-year extension) to implement Reading Apprenticeship in rural North Carolina school districts. The grant supported this expansion of Reading Apprenticeship, which provided sustained engagement in professional learning, coaching, and other supports to help grade 9 and 10 teachers integrate reading, writing and discussion into ELA, science, and social studies instruction. SRI conducted an independent evaluation of the project’s implementation and effects on student perseverance and achievement.  

This final report describes the implementation, descriptive, and impact studies of Accelerating Literacy Through Self-Regulation, Collaboration, and Persistence: Reading Apprenticeship in North Carolina, which was implemented in 19 North Carolina districts and expanded to 6 Pennsylvania districts. For the implementation study, SRI used programmatic, survey, interview, and observation data to assess the extent to which the key project components were implemented as intended and what factors facilitated or constrained implementation. The descriptive study used teacher reports of changes in student self-regulation, collaboration, and persistence in their classrooms over the two years of implementation. For the impact study, SRI relied on a quasi-experimental design, matching schools within Reading Apprenticeship districts (treatment group) to schools in other North Carolina districts (comparison group). This study compared perseverance and achievement – as measured by attendance, course grades, and end-of-course state standardized test scores in grades 9 and 10 – in the treatment and comparison schools after one and two years of Reading Apprenticeship implementation.  

Overall, implementation fidelity was mixed, perhaps because of challenges associated with the post-pandemic climate. Teacher professional learning and leadership training reached higher levels of fidelity in some districts than others, while implementation of core RA classroom practices was consistently limited. Despite the mixed implementation findings, the impact study found positive effects of Reading Apprenticeship on the proximal outcomes of science course grades in both the one- and two-year analyses. This finding is consistent with previous research on Reading Apprenticeship that found positive effects on both teacher and student science outcomes (Greenleaf et al., 2011; Gulemetova et al., 2023). However, in this study, there were no impacts on more distal outcomes such as attendance and end-of-course standardized test scores.