Improving Education Using a Classroom-Based Literacy Intervention: Causal Evidence of One District’s Effective Practice

• In Event: Roundtable Session 110
  In Roundtable Session: Assessing Impact of Literacy Interventions on Student Outcomes in a Variety of Settings

Abstract

Strong literacy skills are crucial to ensuring student success both in and beyond their formal schooling. Existing evidence suggests that the transition from elementary to middle school is a particularly crucial period for literacy development and requires sustained support of students through this transition. I capitalize on a district-based rule that assigns students to a supplementary reading class in middle school if they score below a designated cutoff score on a 5th grade test to employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and estimate the effect of participating in this supplementary reading class. Using this natural experiment I find that the district-delivered, research-driven instructional intervention generates increases in standardized reading and mathematics test scores across the middle school grades.

Author

• Shaun Michael Dougherty, Harvard University