“On average, students of the Pathway teacher group showed moderate improvement from pre-test to post-test the first year, and students in the second-year Pathway group showed high improvement,” said lead study author Carol Booth Olson, professor of education, creator of the Pathway Project and director of the UCI Writing Project. “These robust findings demonstrate the impact of teacher training on student outcomes. There is stronger growth in student achievement after two years of teacher participation, highlighting the importance of sustained professional development.”
The study, conducted in 2012-13 and 2013-14, involved 95 teachers in 16 Anaheim Union High School District schools. They and one of each participant’s classes were randomly assigned to either the Pathway group or a control group.
Before the beginning of school each year, the Pathway teachers learned how to integrate cognitive strategies into their existing language arts curriculum, while instructors in the control group did not.
“Cognitive strategies are tools and resources that help students improve their academic literacy and writing skills,” Olson explained. “Reading and writing are taught as a process that includes pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading activities that enhance students’ abilities to summarize, make inferences, interpret, draw conclusions, evaluate, assess, revise and reflect as they read and write about complex texts. We use a tool kit analogy and visual aids that identify the different techniques for reading comprehension and analytical writing. Students are encouraged to think of themselves as craftsmen who reach into their mental tool kit to construct meaning from, or with, words.”
Study co-authors are Tina Matuchniak, academic coordinator; Huy Q. Chung, director of research for the UCI Writing Project; Rachel Stumpf, a doctoral candidate in the School of Education; and George Farkas, professor of education.
Material from a press release was used in this report.
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