LAUSD High School Students Make Dramatic Improvement in Reading Skill

LAUSD high school students who were part of a pilot sponsored by LAEP and LAUSD made significant gains in literacy, according to a recently released report by the research organization WestEd.

Across all seven network schools, the pilot group's independent reading levels on the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) rose from 47.02 in the fall to 52.85 in the spring, a gain of 5.83 units.

"Typical high school gains on the DRP test are one or two points and this group exceeded an expected year's growth by more than three units. That's a significant gain," said LAEP Vice President Judy Johnson.

The pilot was of a teacher professional development program focused on improving reading skills of high school students. Teams of teachers from seven LAUSD high schools participated in the "Strategic Literacy Network," an inquiry process developed by WestEd. They met during the 1999-2000 school year to discuss case studies of students' reading and classroom strategies for developing high levels of literacy. Nearly all of the teachers in this group are part of LAEP's Humanitas teacher network.

"This performance represents a growth from being able to read independently books by such authors as Judy Blume to books by such authors as John Steinbeck," Johnson said.

Within the population of students tested, 79 were designated as Limited English Proficient (LEP), 90 had been redesignated from LEP and 27 were designated at "initially fluent". An additional 142 students reported that they spoke two or more languages, but data was unavailable in regard to fluency. In the LAUSD network as a whole, entry-level students in each of these four groups improved their reading during the school year.

The DRP is a Cloze test that assess students' ability to use the information in passages of non-fiction text on a variety of topics to figure out the meaning of text. In a Cloze text, words in a passage of text have been deleted and the student is asked to select the correct word for each deletion in the text from a set of multiple choice options.

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