VGC, University of Houston win grant to create Texas Adolescent Literacy Project
Researchers at the Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts and the University of Houston have been awarded a multimillion-dollar grant to launch a two-year study targeting struggling readers in grades 6 through 8.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has earmarked $4 million to create the Texas Adolescent Literacy Project, which will work to develop and evaluate assessment and intervention approaches for middle school students who struggle with reading. The Legislature has appropriated $2 million for the first year of the grant, and pending renewal, an additional $2 million will be available for the second year.
“There is an emphasis nationwide now being put on adolescent literacy, and it is in dire need of study,” said the Center’s Carolyn Denton, who will serve as principal investigator (PI) for the project. “We need a lot more information.”
The majority of the last decade’s reading research and programs have explored literacy instruction in the primary grades. To close this gap, many researchers have turned their focus to interventions for secondary students with reading difficulties, and the need for their work is clear. According to the Carnegie Corporation of New York report Reading Next: A Vision for Action and Research in Middle and High School Literacy, 70 percent of older readers require some form of remediation, and older students’ reading difficulties often lead to a host of economic and psychological problems.
The Texas Adolescent Literacy Project aims to create new methods for identifying and monitoring the progress of struggling readers and to develop a tiered intervention model, which may be similar to the 3-Tier Reading Model but will specifically target middle school students. The project will result in the creation of a set of professional development materials that will be accessible to Texas middle schools.
Researchers from the University of Houston, including Jack Fletcher and David Francis, will work alongside Center staff members on the project. The Center’s Sharon Vaughn will serve as an investigator, and Jeanne Wanzek will be project coordinator. In addition to drawing upon the expertise of several other Center researchers, the team plans to hire “quite a few” people for the project, according to Denton.
The school districts the team will use to test its assessment and intervention programs have not yet been determined, though the plan is to include urban, rural, and suburban schools. The project will ramp up this summer, and researchers will be in the schools this fall, leaving the team quite busy for the next few months.
“This is a huge project on a short timeline,” Denton said. “This will be a major effort, to say the least.”