Changing Adolescents’ Reading Trajectories

Challenge

In the United States, 33% of Grade 8 students lack basic reading proficiency, limiting their ability to succeed in school and prepare for future work. Many students reach middle school without the reading skills needed to understand academic texts, and these gaps often widen over time. When students struggle to read well, they also struggle to learn across subjects, making it harder to stay on track academically and transition successfully beyond school.

EDC and Reading Futures Changing Adolescents’ Reading Trajectories project addresses this challenge by strengthening literacy outcomes for middle-grade students with reading difficulties through high-intensity virtual tutoring, with a focus on students in rural communities. The project provides frequent, structured reading support that helps students build decoding skills, improve comprehension, and better understand informational text used in academic subjects such as science and social studies. By building evidence on how this approach supports adolescent readers, the project aims to inform how schools can use high-intensity tutoring to improve reading outcomes for students who need additional support.

Key Activities

The project is carrying out the following activities:

• Designing and refining an enhanced high-intensity tutoring model that addresses the needs of middle-grade students with persistent reading difficulties, particularly in rural school settings
• Conducting formative research to integrate word decoding instruction with subject-area reading, ensuring the tutoring approach supports adolescents’ comprehension of academic informational texts
• Leading a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effects of high-intensity tutoring on word decoding, reading comprehension, and informational text skills
• Disseminating findings to educators, policymakers, and researchers to inform decisions about adopting, sustaining, and scaling effective tutoring approaches for adolescent readers

Our Impact

The project will:

• Improve word decoding, reading comprehension, and informational text skills for middle-grade students with significant reading difficulties
• Provide tutoring to approximately 22 districts, 66 schools, and 790 middle-grade students across the United States
• Generate rigorous RCT evidence to deepen understanding of the extent to which high-intensity tutoring improves literacy outcomes for students identified as needing Tier 2 or 3 reading support
• Provide insights into how to design and scale effective tutoring approaches for middle-grade readers in rural and tribal communities.
• Advance knowledge about supporting adolescents’ transition from basic word reading to comprehension of informational texts.