Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(8) May 2009doi:10.1598/JAAL.52.8.7 © 2009 International Reading Association (pp. 720–722)

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In this installment of Research Connections, the editor, David W. Moore, in-quires into the research practice links being made by Rosemary Staley, Christina Thornley, and Trevor McDonald in the San Diego Unified School District’s Striving Readers’ Project. These three researchers combined their efforts in 2003 when Thornley and McDonald began working with Staley after being recruited to help San Diego Unified extend its blueprint for student success from the el-ementary schools to the middle and high schools.

As the eighth-largest school district in the United States, San Diego Unified is an ethnically diverse district of 138,000 students of whom almost one third are English-language learners and more than half qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The project has been funded through the U.S. Department of Education Striving Readers Grant (#S371A060022; www.ed.gov/programs/strivingreaders /index.html) and focuses on building a strong research base for the identification and replication of successful adolescent literacy initiatives.

What Is the Research Base for the San Diego Striving Readers’ Project?The project developed out of a longitudinal study into the literacy learning of adolescents in New Zealand (McDonald & Thornley, 2004, 2005; Thornley & McDonald, 2002) and from our experiences in using the initial findings from this study in San Diego schools from 2003 to 2005. When we began working together, San Diego Unified was using a literature-based literacy instructional approach for struggling adolescents that didn’t really help students in the content areas. Our response was to use the instructional approaches developed from the New Zealand work to introduce literacy instruction using content area texts in content area classes. It seemed obvious to build on this when the opportunity to apply for a Striving Readers grant arose.

Although it might seem odd to use a literacy approach developed in New Zealand for a project in the United States, we believe there is much to be learned from the literacy experiences of New Zealand’s adolescents. Although these stu-dents perform very well in international literacy assessments, the spread of their achievement is among the widest of any participating country. This unusual pattern of achievement is ref lected in our longitudinal study where 100 young people from five schools were tracked during their high school years. Through annual interviews, surveys, and assessments, we compared what very able stu-dents told us about literacy with students whose success was relatively modest

The San Diego Striving Readers’ Project: Building

Academic Success for Adolescent

ReadersTrevor McDonald

Christina Thornley Rosemary StaleyDavid W. Moore

Research Connections

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and with students who struggled. This enabled us to describe the literacy skills and knowledge that we be-lieve lead to academic success across the curriculum.

What Is Distinctive About the Research Underpinning the San Diego Striving Readers’ Project?We see our longitudinal study as distinctive in the field of adolescent literacy research because it is one of the few that has tracked adolescents’ literate experi-ences and growth across the secondary school years and across the content areas. It is built on what stu-dents told us about their challenges and successes in those situations.

The students in this study helped us to recognize that, along with a set of cognitive skills that apply to literacy, there is a knowledge base that encompasses the ways authors express ideas and information in dif-ferent text forms for a variety of purposes. Developing and applying this knowledge base across texts and tasks in the content areas is central to the literacy suc-cess of more capable students, and it’s generally lack-ing in those who struggle.

The skills that the students described fell into five sets that form the basis of our Strategic Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas (SLIC) curriculum:

1. Previewing text, then applying knowledge about text forms and the ways to use this knowledge to prepare for reading or writing

2. Using the surface and language features of a text to build content knowledge prior to reading

3. Enhancing comprehension by using more com-plex skills such as inference and synthesis while continually cross-checking new understand-ings with what was learned from the preview

4. Solving vocabulary problems as they arise dur-ing the reading processes

5. Writing for a range of purposes and audiences

Another distinctive finding from our research is that students used the above skill sets to approach the different text and task demands encountered across content areas. Our work with teachers, therefore, em-phasizes the use of a stable routine for approaching

new texts and tasks. Thus, across the content areas we focus on the following teaching approaches:

n Orientation to the features and form of the text to build content knowledge

n Analysis of the task to determine the reading focus

n Note-making

n Questioning, discussion, and ref lection on the reading processes used to gain content knowledge

n Writing and writing instruction depending on the task demands

Finally, our research is distinctive because it led us to use grade-level appropriate texts and tasks as the conduit for teaching in this project. This decision arose from many students’ comments that teacher-adapted texts did not help them access the more sophisticat-ed information they needed for academic success. It also rests on the premise that many students have re-ceived remedial teaching with leveled texts that did not help them close the gap between them and their more able peers. Our challenge is to teach students how to be successful using the very texts required for that success.

What New Ideas and Information Have You Generated During This Project?We use our continually developing knowledge of stu-dents’ thinking and achievement to inform our work. We are in classrooms most days of the week to observe, talk to, and work with teachers and students. We also use a number of assessment tools, the most significant of these being the SLIC diagnostic reading assessment we are developing with Mark Wilson and his team at the University of California, Berkeley (bearcenter .berkeley.edu/projects/StrivingReaders_page.php).

The SLIC assessment uses content area texts around which we frame questions to test students’ application of skills from the curriculum. Descriptors and exem-plars of increasingly sophisticated responses enable us to score students’ responses and measure improvement. Additionally, each skill has been reduced to either

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provide opportunities for students to discuss the man-ner in which the curriculum and pedagogy are affect-ing their learning.

Within the project we have had to describe in de-tail what each element of the SLIC curriculum looks like, what it does, and why we approach the applica-tion of the research in the way we do. This process has made clear that routine is a critical element of the ap-proach and that this must extend across lessons, texts, tasks, and content areas if we are to be successful in raising achievement. Describing this routine and its benefits for student achievement are important com-ponents of our ongoing research.

We are beginning to recognize the crucial im-portance of students writing about their learning as it occurs, keeping journals of their developing think-ing, and recording ideas about how they can use their knowledge and skills when approaching new and chal-lenging literacy tasks. Finally, we now are committed to investigating the power of talk and of ref lection on learning as a central element in raising achievement.

ReferencesMcDonald, T., & Thornley, C. (2004). Literacy strategies for un-

locking meaning in content area texts: Using student voices to inform professional development. Thinking Classroom, 5(3), 7–14.

McDonald, T., & Thornley, C. (2005). Literacy teaching and learning during the secondary years: Establishing a pathway for success to NCEA and beyond. set: Research Information for Teachers, 2, 9–14.

Thornley, C., & McDonald, T. (2002). Reading across the cur-riculum: Secondary students talk about themselves as readers. set: Research Information for Teachers, 1, 19–24.

McDonald works for Education Associates, Inc. and is a program developer for the San Diego Unified Striving Readers’ Project, San Diego, California, USA; e-mail trevor@earthlight.co.nz. Thornley works for Education Associates, Inc. and is a program developer for the San Diego Unified Striving Readers’ Project; e-mail christina@edassoc.co.nz. Staley works for the San Diego Unified School District and is program manager for the Striving Readers’ Project; e-mail rcstaley@sandi.net.David W. Moore teaches at Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA; e-mail david.moore@asu.edu.

The department editor welcomes reader comments. David W. Moore teaches at Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA; e-mail david.moore@asu.edu.

tactics or to sets of steps depending on the complexity of the skill to be undertaken. Tactics are the behaviors readers adopt to obtain relatively accessible informa-tion such as main ideas of paragraphs. When reading at deeper levels and applying complex skills such as syn-thesis, students must be strategic in their reading be-havior and make decisions about the steps they should go through to make sense of their reading.

Although there is tremendous power in having an assessment that monitors improvement, its great-est impact is in terms of pedagogical knowledge. In specifying the skills, tactics, and steps at the level we have reached, we now have the means to direct stu-dents toward successful and skillful reading.

How Has Your Practice Affected Your Uses of Research?The original SLIC curriculum was developed as we taught lessons across the content areas, analyzed stu-dents’ work, and interviewed students in focus groups about the instructional approaches that we used. Throughout this process, and as the SLIC curriculum evolved, we theorized the patterns and anomalies re-garding students’ literacy learning and achievement that we encountered in the data. To do this, we read from the international research literature, studied other curricula, and analyzed the demands of inter-national literacy assessments. Similarly, as we develop more specific content for the project classes and re-fine our understanding of appropriate pedagogical ap-proaches, we continue to return to available research to test our understandings and ideas.

What Research-Practice Connections Are Becoming Clear to You During This Project?Research is the foundation for our work, and it is central to how we refine the project. A major find-ing from our longitudinal study and our current research is that a student’s progress is unique to the individual and that we must pay constant attention to understanding learning at that level and in rela-tion to specific contexts. To be consistent with our original intent to understand adolescent literacy from students’ perspectives, we must also ensure that we