Accelerating Literacy for Adolescents (ALFA) Lab Regression Discontinuity Evaluation

Many students from neighborhoods of concentrated poverty enter high school with underdeveloped reading skills, and skill gaps can create widespread achievement and engagement problems for students in high school, as well as college and career. The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of ALFA (Accelerating Literacy for Adolescents) Lab, a one-semester extra-help small-group class that supports incoming 9th grade high school students who are poor readers. The evaluation project involved researchers using a regression discontinuity design to compare reading outcomes for three cohorts of students from schools across the United States who were just above or just below a test cutoff score used to assign students to the ALFA Lab. Researchers assessed students’ literacy outcomes at the beginning and the end of 9th grade, including the Star assessment for reading achievement and the Adaptive Reading Motivation Measure to assess student motivation to read.