This technical report provides a detailed description of C3WP and the findings from the evaluation of the i3 Scale-up grant.
Research Brief: SRI Finds Positive Effects of the College, Career, and Community Writer’s Program on Student Achievement
The National Writing Project’s (NWP) College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) is designed to improve students’ argument writing through intensive teacher professional development, instructional resources, and formative assessment.
The Pathway to Academic Success: Scaling Up a Text-Based Analytical Writing Intervention for Latinos and English Learners in Secondary School
This study reports findings from a randomized trial designed to validate and scale up a professional development program that uses a cognitive strategies approach to text-based analytical writing.
Evaluation of National Writing Project’s College-Ready Writer’s Program 2015 SEED Grant
The National Writing Project’s (NWP) College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) provides professional development for teachers in Grades 7–10 with the goal of improving students’ source-based argument writing. C3WP aims to build teachers’ understanding of and skill in teaching argument writing. C3WP was subject to a prior rigorous evaluation, which found that 2 years of C3WP had a positive impact on writing outcomes for students in Grades 7-10 in high-need, rural districts (Gallagher et al., 2017). C3WP was formerly called the College-Ready Writers Program (CRWP). In 2015, with the support of a Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant, the National Writing Project sought to extend the reach of the program to nonrural contexts and to examine the efficacy of a short-cycle version of the program. The SEED grant also supported researchers at SRI Education to conduct an independent evaluation (a within-teacher randomized controlled trial) designed to examine both program implementation and the impact of the program on teachers’ instructional practices and student learning. This report presents the results of the short-cycle impact analysis that focused on 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts (ELA) teachers in high-needs districts. The technical report begins with a discussion of the C3WP program components and intended outcomes. Then, it describes the research design including a discussion of recruitment and randomization; site, teacher, class, and student samples; and data and methods. Finally, the report provides findings related to program implementation, teacher practice outcomes, and student learning outcomes. Ultimately, we find that the short-cycle implementation of C3WP had positive and statistically significant impacts on a measure of student writing achievement.
Emerging Leaders Program: Impacts on Students, Teachers, and Leaders in Three Sites
In 2017–18, New Leaders partnered with SRI Education to undertake a randomized control trial of the Emerging Leaders program in three sites: Arlington Independent School District and San Antonio Independent School District in Texas and Shelby County Schools in Tennessee. The Emerging Leaders program was implemented largely as designed and had a positive, statistically significant impact on participants’ data-driven instruction leadership knowledge. This large impact on leadership knowledge led to few measured impacts on the instructional practice of teachers on Emerging Leaders participants’ instructional teams. The program had positive impacts on the math achievement of some subgroups of students. Impacts on overall math achievement were mediated by (i.e., operated through) program impacts on participants’ leadership knowledge and by teachers’ participation on instructional teams. The Emerging Leaders program had no measured impact on students’ English language arts (ELA) achievement. Supplemental analyses suggest that these differences in student achievement impacts may have been driven by differences in how datadriven instruction was enacted by math- and ELA-focused instructional teams.
Lifewide or School-Only Learning: Approaches to Addressing the Developing World’s Learning Crisis
This cluster randomized controlled trial tested the impact of school-only and lifewide-learning (LWL) approaches to supporting early-grade learning over 2 years in rural Rwanda. We compare school-only and LWL treatments with a business-as-usual control condition and with each other. Schools in both treatment groups received reading materials and teacher training. LWL villages also received support to enrich home and community literacy ecologies. Student reading assessments, administered across 21 sectors (analogous to U.S. school districts), showed that both treatments positively impacted learning. LWL produced a greater impact, particularly in oral comprehension, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. However, nearly one third of the students lacked basic skills at endline, indicating that further efforts are needed to address the learning crisis in the least-developed countries.
Linked Learning San Bernardino (LLSB): Accelerating College and Career Readiness in Low-Performing Schools
In 2013, ConnectEd received an Investing in Innovation (i3) Development grant to support the development of Linked Learning career-themed academies in four high schools in the San Bernardino City Unified School District (SBCUSD). This technical report provides an independent evaluation examining both the program implementation and the impact of the program on students’ cognitive and noncognitive outcomes.
Impacts on Students of a Short-Cycle Implementation of the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program
In an independent evaluation, SRI International found that a two-year implementation of the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) had a positive, statistically significant effect on a validated measure of students’ source-based argument writing (Gallagher, Arshan, & Woodworth, 2017).In response to policymakers’ and district leaders’ questions about the intensity of resources used, the National Writing Project partnered with SRI to test the efficacy of a short-cycle implementation of C3WP. In this study, SRI randomized two classrooms of 31 teachers into either C3WP or business as usual. These were seventh- or eighth-grade classrooms in 12 urban and rural high-needs schools across five states. (One teacher withdrew from the study.) The teachers had six months to use C3WP curricular materials and formative assessment tools in their C3WP class before measuring student writing outcomes in both classes.
Teaching students to write arguments developed through reasoning and supported by the use of evidence from source material is complex. This study showed a positive, statistically significant impact on two attributes of student source-based argument writing, demonstrating promise for the short-cycle version of C3WP professional development in impacting students’ ability to engage in such writing. The findings were less robust than those from the two-year version of the program, however. This suggests that although schools may see results from C3WP in a single school year, a longer term investment may produce a greater impact. This study also expanded C3WP into urban contexts, demonstrating potential effectiveness for a broader range of students.
UC Irvine Writing Project’s pathway to academic success program: An Investing in Innovation (i3) validation grant evaluation
This technical report provides impact and implementation fidelity results from SRI’s Evaluation of the Pathway to Academic Success Project –i3 Validation Grant. The Pathway Project is a teacher professional development program designed to enhance classroom literacy.