The Impact of Two Professional Development Interventions on Early Reading Instruction and Achievement

Professional development (PD) of teachers is viewed as a vital tool in school improvement
efforts (Hill 2007). The importance of professional development (PD) for teachers is underscored
in several major federal education initiatives, including the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) statute.
For example, Title II of NCLB provided $585 million to states and districts for PD activities during
the 2002-2003 school year alone in order to meet the goal of having a highly qualified teacher in
every classroom (U.S. Department of Education, 2005). Two years later, Title II funding for PD
remained at over $500 million (U.S. Department of Education 2007).
Are teachers receiving the PD that they need? A recent national study of state and local
NCLB implementation indicated that 80 percent of elementary teachers reported participating in 24
hours of PD on reading instruction or less during the 2003–2004 school year and summer (U.S.
Department of Education 2007). Reading and PD experts have raised a concern that this level of
PD is not intensive enough to be effective, and that it does not focus enough on subject-matter
knowledge (Cohen and Hill 2001; Fletcher and Lyon 1998; Foorman and Moats 2004; Garet, Porter,
Desimone, Birman, and Yoon 2001).
To help states and districts make informed decisions about the PD they implement to
improve reading instruction, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned the Early Reading
PD Interventions Study to examine the impact of two research-based PD interventions for reading
instruction: (1) a content-focused teacher institute series that began in the summer and continued
through much of the school year (treatment A) and (2) the same institute series plus in-school
coaching (treatment B). The study team consists of AIR, MDRC, and REDA International, Inc.,
who conducted the research activities, and Sopris West and the Consortium on Reading Excellence
(CORE), who delivered the teacher and coach PD.
The Early Reading PD Interventions Study used an experimental design to test the
effectiveness of the two PD interventions in improving the knowledge and practice of teachers and
the reading achievement of their students in high-poverty schools. It focused specifically on second
grade reading because (1) this is the earliest grade in which enough districts collect the standardized
reading assessment data needed for the study; and (2) later grades involve supplementary (pull out)
instruction, which was outside the scope of the study. The study was implemented in 90 schools in
six districts (a total of 270 teachers), with equal numbers of schools randomly assigned in each
district to treatment A, treatment B, or the control group, which participated only in the usual PD
offered by the district. This design allowed the study team to determine the impact of each of the
two PD interventions by comparing each treatment group’s outcomes with those of the control
group, and also to determine the impact of the coaching above and beyond the institute series by
comparing treatment group B with treatment group A.
This report describes the implementation of the PD interventions tested, and examines their
impacts at the end of the year the PD was delivered. In addition, we investigate the possible lagged effect of the interventions, based on outcomes data collected the year after the PD interventions
concluded.