Douglas M. Mosher

Scaling up evidence-based educational interventions to improve student outcomes presents challenges, particularly in adapting to new contexts while maintaining fidelity. Structured teacher adaptations that integrate the strengths of experimental science (high fidelity) and improvement science (high adaptation) offer a viable solution to bridge the research-practice divide. This preregistered randomized controlled trial study examines the effectiveness of structured teacher adaptations in a Tier 1 content literacy intervention delivered through asynchronous and synchronous methods during COVID-19 on Grade 3 students’ (N = 1,914) engagement in digital app and print-based reading activities, student-teacher interactions, and learning outcomes. Our structured teacher adaptations achieved higher average outcomes and minimal treatment heterogeneity across schools, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of the intervention rather than undermining it.

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This study contributes to the science of teaching reading by illustrating how a ubiquitous classroom practice – read alouds – can be enhanced by fostering teacher language practices that support students’ ability to read for understanding. This experimental study examines whether and to what extent providing structured teacher read aloud supplements in a social studies read aloud can allow students to leverage a familiar science schema and thereby positively impact reading comprehension outcomes. Treatment students received a single social studies read-aloud on the story of Apollo 11 with structured teacher read aloud supplements while control students received the same read-aloud story but without structured supplements. Effect sizes from hierarchical linear models indicated that students in the treatment condition significantly outperformed students in the control condition on four measures of domain-specific reading comprehension. Further exploratory analyses using structural equation modeling examined the extent that teacher language mediated the treatment effect. Results indicated that teachers going above and beyond the intervention script explained 67 percent of the treatment effect. Structured supplements for read alouds can help students see important connections between schemas, which ultimately aids in reading comprehension.

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