Assessing the effectiveness of continuing professional development on changes in teacher practice and student learning

Anthony Bryk leads this IES-supported quasi-experimental field trial on the efficacy of the Literacy Collaborative professional development initiative.

Improvement of primary literacy instruction is a pressing national concern. While we acknowledge as a national goal that all students should learn to read by the third grade, we continue to fall far short. The Literacy Collaborative is one of the largest and most promising initiatives to address literacy instruction. It is used in almost 600 elementary schools in 200 districts across 26 states. It builds on some 30 years of systematic research and development on early literacy learning. This is an IES-funded “Goal 2 Study” that involves original measurement development on teacher practice, construction of a development metric from component reading skill inventories, social network measurement, and, of course, all of the logistical and technical nuances associated with systematic education field trials.