A Study of the Efficacy of Reading Apprenticeship Professional Development for High School History and Science Teaching and Learning

This report describes findings from an efficacy study examining the effects of professional development focused on integrating academic literacy instruction with content area coursework on teacher instructional practices and student achievement in reading and high school biology and US history. The research builds on a well-tested approach to literacy instruction, Reading Apprenticeship (RA), which integrates metacognitive inquiry into ongoing content area instruction to make explicit the tacit reasoning processes, strategies, and discourse rules that shape successful readers' and writers' work in the discipline. The central dynamic of the instructional model is routine metacognitive conversation; that is, talking about the reasoning and problem solving processes that accompany reading as students carry out learning tasks in the science curriculum. The study targeted schools serving high numbers of students from populations underrepresented in higher education. The multiple measures of teacher implementation give us a robust corroboration of teacher level outcomes. Teachers in the experimental group demonstrated increased support for history and biology literacy learning, increased use of metacognitive inquiry routines, increased reading comprehension instruction, and increased use of collaborative learning structures. In short, they were more able to integrate science and science literacy learning in classroom instruction. The results of the study thus present a positive picture with regards to the effectiveness of the Reading Apprenticeship framework for integrating academic literacy content with biology and history coursework and instructional practices.