UC Irvine researchers have received a $2.9 million grant to provide professional development for teachers in Orange County's largest school district. The goal: improving English literacy among students with a different primary language.

The grant to UCI's Department of Education will fund a four-year study called the Pathway Project. UCI researchers will teach instructors in the Santa Ana Unified School District cognitive strategies aimed at developing higher-level reading and writing skills in their students. The goal is to prepare these students for required high school exit exams and give them the literacy skills necessary to enter into and succeed in college.

"In testing proficiency in English language arts, the state of California has moved away from the model where students are only required to read and summarize," said Carol Booth Olson, senior lecturer in UCI's Department of Education and principal investigator of the project. "The requirement today is for thoughtful comprehension and analysis in reading and writing, and, unfortunately, most of these non-native English-speaking students have a very difficult time with that because they have had little practice interpreting difficult texts."

The project will involve 104 middle- and high-school teachers and more than 1,800 students. To better test the efficacy of the program, the teachers will be divided into two groups, with one set of teachers initially serving as a control group. The students will move as a cadre through the grades and be taught strategic reading and analytical writing. The teachers will receive instruction on how to guide their students in inferring a writer's intentions and messages; assessing a writer's work for deeper meaning; and writing well-developed essays.

"The teachers must show their students what an experienced reader and writer does when he or she is analyzing text or writing a meaningful essay," Olson said. "The students learn through imitation and practice, and we will teach the teachers how to make the sometimes invisible acts of mind that skilled readers and writers engage in become visible to their students."

The researchers will use the upcoming academic year to develop assessment measures and finalize the curriculum. The teachers will come to UCI for a weeklong training session next August and will begin implementing the strategies in their classrooms in the 2007-2008 academic year.

The Santa Ana Unified School District is the fifth largest in California and has the greatest number of minority students among all Orange County school districts. The student population in the district is 97 percent ethnic minority, and 60 percent of those students have a limited proficiency in English.

The Pathway Project builds on similar collaborations between UCI and the school district, which have existed since 1981 and demonstrated great success. For example, the percentage of students in 2004 who passed the English portion of the California High School Exit Exam was 93 percent for those participating in the earlier projects, compared to 66 percent for those in the control group.

Other researchers from UCI participating in the project are Robin Scarcella, director of the English as a Second Language program; David Van Dyk, associate professor of statistics; and Penelope Chiappe and James Kim, assistant professors of education. The grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences.

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