Reading proficiency correlates strongly with educational attainment and broader life outcomes. Yet secondary students with disabilities are not developing the reading skills necessary to support college and career readiness. By equipping secondary educators with applied skills and knowledge drawn from the science of reading, we can close the research-to-practice gap and improve outcomes for nonproficient secondary readers.
Turning the Page to Secondary Literacy includes a set of best practices for improving learning outcomes in secondary students — particularly Black and Latinx students with disabilities experiencing poverty — using evidence-based practices for reading intervention in the secondary setting.
This collection includes four best practices that participating schools used to plan, implement, and monitor the effectiveness of secondary reading interventions, as well as tools and templates to bring the practices to life. It concludes with one case study showcasing a professional learning community designed to build the capacity of NIC educators to use data to enhance these practices.
The collection also includes a literature review of research on reading intervention for students in grades 4–12, which synthesizes the evidence on instructional practices for nonproficient readers.
In addition, our work highlights several cross-cutting takeaways about improving literacy at the secondary level:
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Tiered assessment to guide literacy intervention planning refers to the practice of identifying secondary students who are at risk of not meeting grade-level ELA benchmarks or standards, pinpointing specific reading skill gaps for these students, and planning aligned evidence-based interventions to address the identified skill gaps. This practice outlines the individual steps involved in this process — (1) universal screening of reading, (2) diagnostic assessment of reading, and (3) alignment of evidence-based interventions to student needs — and provides guidance on the selection of assessments, development of decision-making criteria, and protocols for collaborative data-driven decision-making.
In 2022–23, three out of four students receiving additional reading interventions made progress in their oral reading fluency.
Repeated reading directly builds oral reading fluency skills, which has the potential to unlock access to grade level content for students. Fluent, accurate, and automatic word reading is strongly correlated with reading comprehension, or the ability to make meaning from text, which is the ultimate goal of reading. This practice describes the implementation of repeated reading — an evidence-based practice for building oral reading fluency — connected to authentic grade-level instruction, across several settings within the NIC. This practice includes a three-day repeated reading protocol.
Through a daily oral reading fluency practice, students with IEPs at Noble Schools demonstrated beginning- to end-of-year Lexile growth commensurate with students without IEPs.
Multisyllabic words make up the majority of words that secondary readers encounter in text. As a result, weak or dysfluent multisyllabic word reading can significantly impact a student’s ability to access and make meaning from complex grade-level texts. This practice explores how to approach word study intervention to build secondary students’ multisyllabic word-reading skills using authentic texts from content area courses.
By the end of the 2022–23 school year, all students at Uncommon Charter High School in Brooklyn, New York, enrolled in Academic Prep, a reading intervention class for 9th grade students with reading disabilities, read text with 98–100% accuracy.
Effective implementation of secondary reading intervention requires establishing clear student goals, implementing valid and reliable assessments to monitor student progress toward those goals, and engaging in regular analysis of progress monitoring data to guide instruction and intervention planning decisions. This practice provides guidance on the selection of progress monitoring tools and outlines a process for collecting data, conferencing with students, and analyzing data to inform intervention decisions.
Half of the students who participated in the reading fluency intervention at Green Dot Public Schools during the 2022–23 school year increased their oral reading fluency by over 30 words-per-minute from fall to spring. As a result, Green Dot educators decided to exit these students from an oral reading fluency intervention because they had met the benchmark.
Educators need access to professional development and coaching aligned with the science of reading. This case study includes best practices for building the capacity of secondary educators to implement evidence-based interventions for student literacy. These practices emerged from two years of leading professional learning communities (PLCs) on evidence-based literacy interventions focused on applying the practices in secondary classroom settings. Together with corresponding recommended resources, they provide a blueprint for schools across the country to build educator capacity for teaching reading.
100% of participants reported that the PLC enhanced their knowledge related to adolescent literacy, provided them with practical tools and resources that were applicable to their work, and was instrumental in addressing challenges faced within their roles and local contexts.
Interdisciplinary practices for building collaboration between general and special education teams
Equity-based practices for using data at the district, school, and classroom levels to accelerate student supports
Proven school-based practices to empower students to transition into meaningful college, career, and community postsecondary pathways
One school’s skill-based practices for supporting students with emotional-based disabilities
Evidence-based practices to improve outcomes for Black and Latinx students with disabilities experiencing poverty