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AdLit.org offers articles that provide research-based and best-practice information for educators, parents, and others interested in helping young people become better readers and writers.
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Linking the Language: A Cross-Disciplinary Vocabulary Approach
A strategy for vocabulary instruction that involves introducing new vocabulary in related clusters. This approach can help diverse learners, including English-minority students, make important vocabulary connections.
The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools
The social and economic implications of America's high dropout rate are staggering. In addition to the waste of human potential, the costs of dropouts include lower tax revenues from lower paying jobs, higher crime rates, higher demand for social services, and the loss of global economic competitiveness.
What Are the Key Components of Dropout Prevention Programs?
Dropout prevention research shows that most programs use more than one type of intervention (family outreach, academic tutoring, personalization and vocational training, for example). While there is no one right way to intervene, research has identified several key components to intervention success.
What Do We Know About Who Drops Out and Why?
Students decide to drop out for many reasons. This overview classifies the reasons as either status (e.g., age, socioeconomic status, geographic region or mobility) or alterable (e.g., grades, disruptive behaviors, school climate, attitude toward school). Recognizing the difference between variables is critical to designing effective interventions.
Making Writing Instruction a Priority in America's Middle and High Schools
Sometimes writing is seen as the flip side of reading, and it is assumed that students who are proficient readers will naturally be proficient writers. While reading and writing are complementary skills, students do not become skilled writers without explicit instruction. This policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education examines how writing can be taught in secondary schools and how policy can encourage more teachers to undertake writing instruction.
Use and Teach Content Vocabulary Daily
Copying definitions from the dictionary and memorizing words for tests is not sufficient work for students to master and retain new vocabulary. This article helps teachers choose which words are most important to teach and suggests strategies to bring those words to life for students.
Use the Cooperative Learning Model
Cooperative learning fosters group accountability and provides struggling readers with the opportunity to work with stronger academic role models. Learn how to introduce this strategy in the classroom.
Dropout Risk Factors and Exemplary Programs
Dropout decisions may involve up to 25 significant factors, ranging from parenthood to learning disabilities. The most effective interventions address the various factors and employ multiple strategies, including personal asset building, academic support, and family outreach. A list of 50 exemplary programs is included.
What Does Research Tell Us About Teaching Reading to English Language Learners?
In this article, a seasoned ELL teacher synthesizes her own classroom experience and the findings of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth to make recommendations for effective literacy instruction of ELL students.
African-American Students and U.S. High Schools
This fact sheet, prepared by the Alliance for Excellent Education, looks at statistics related to the graduation rates and college readiness of African-American students, as well as the quality of the teachers and schools that serve them.
Adolescents and Literacy: Reading for the 21st Century
This report reviews and analyzes existing research on effective literacy instruction and the impact of successful literacy programs for students in grades 4-12.
A Conceptual Model of Adolescent Literacy
A graphic representation of four sectors — perceptions, achievement, programs, and demographics — that influence adolescent literacy. A glossary of the conceptual model's components is included.
Reading Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners
Explicit teaching of reading comprehension skills will help English Language Learners apply these strategies to all subject matter.
Why the Crisis in Adolescent Literacy Demands a National Response
This policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education asserts that it makes little sense to create a strong foundation of reading in grades K-3 if there is no plan to build upon the foundation in later grades. The Alliance offers a series of federal policy recommendations, including the expansion of the Reading First program (K-3) to the upper grades, increased funding to help states use assessments with open-ended writing and analytic reading items, and increased flexibility for schools to schedule more time for reading and writing instruction.
Reading and Writing in the Academic Content Areas
This issue brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education looks at the role every middle and high school teacher must play to help older students become fully literate, and puts forth a four-part agenda for improving literacy in the content areas.
Time is Not on Our Side: Literacy and Literature for High School Language Learners
Given that teachers often have too much to teach and too little time, teacher Dana Dusbiber suggests an alternative approach to teaching literature for secondary ELLs: the introduction of more multicultural literature in the classroom.
Demography as Destiny: How America Can Build a Better Future
Barely 50% of minority students graduate from high school on time. If this trend continues and the minority student populations increase as projected, the economic strength of the U.S. will be undermined. But if 78% of all student populations graduate on time by 2020, the U.S. can realize stunning potential benefits: conservatively, more than $310 billion would be added to the national economy.
Strategies to Improve High Schools
Research suggests six reform strategies that may help high schools better prepare students for college-level work and the workforce: planning at the state and district levels; rigorous curricula; real-world relevant curricula; improving student relationships and personalization; improving transitions to 9th grade, college, and work; and data-driven decision-making. This article lists key actions and offers practical examples and additional resources.
Lessons from New York Life's Revitalizing High School Libraries Initiative
Learn how pilot libraries in the Revitalizing High School Libraries Initiative, seeking to support adolescent literacy, doubled their circulation, increased visits from students and teachers, and expanded the role of library media specialists.
A Closer Look: Closing the Performance Gap
The performance gap — what students are expected to do versus what they can do — is compounded each year a child falls short of acquiring expected skills. As a result, underachieving high school students are at great risk for academic failure, discouragement, and disengagement. This article offers a framework to support adolescent literacy that ties improved student outcomes to an instructional core and an infrastructure core.
Rethinking High School: Five Profiles of Innovative Models for Student Success
Only 68% of all students entering high school nationwide will earn their diploma. The news for students from historically underserved populations is even worse. These students have slightly more than a 50% chance of graduating from high school. To respond to this crisis, educators and policymakers are focused on developing small high schools which offer students a more personalized setting. But is the effort making a difference? In the absence of available long term data, WestEd examined five new, inner-city high schools across the country and discovered rigorous curricula, racially and socioeconomically diverse student bodies, academic access, engaged students, and supportive learning environments.
For Teens, Phonics Isn't Enough
Schools often struggle to find appropriate materials and approaches to support adolescent literacy. Strategies that work for children can ignore teens' existing skills, knowledge, and life experience, and exclude them from the critical content that their peers are studying. Here are some effective teaching strategies for struggling older students.
Re-Conceptualizing Extra Help for High School Students in a High Standards Era
The push to ensure all students engage in challenging classes in high school has created new demands on high schools, including a demand to providing extra help for students who are behind in reading, mathematics, and advanced reasoning skills. This report looks at the nature of the extra help schools must provide and argues that the old model of offering only three types of extra help — functional skills for students deemed to have limited futures, remedial instruction in elementary skills; or tutoring for students struggling to pass a course or improve their test scores — must be abandoned and replaced by interventions that support and accelerate the development of intermediate and even more advanced skills.
What's the Big Idea? Integrating Young Adult Literature in the Middle School
Drawing on New York City teachers' experiences, this article examines three ways to effectively integrate young adult literature into the curriculum: use core texts (usually novels, but also other genres as well) that the entire class read and study together; organize literature study with text sets, allowing students to select from multiple texts to read; and incorporate independent reading into coursework (via Sustained Silent Reading or at-home reading assignments).
Building on their research in secondary classrooms, the Center on English Learning and Achievement has developed guidelines that describe six essential features of effective literacy instruction and how teachers can implement them.
