Research

Learn more about our current and past research projects below.

Current Projects

BOOST Reading Project

Educators across the U.S. are focused on implementing evidence-based practices to support literacy in elementary schools. Given the heterogeneity of students with different strengths and needs, they are also searching for ways to differentiate instruction to meet students' needs. 

Educational technology programs hold promise for supplementing (never replacing!) classroom instruction by providing students with additional opportunities to practice the literacy skills they are learning. However, while millions of dollars are spent on educational technology programs each year, there is relatively little research on the effects and cost-effectiveness of these programs. Drs. Rebecca Silverman, Bruce McCandliss (Stanford University), Gina Biancarosa, Patrick Kennedy (University of Oregon), and Kate Cain (Lancaster University) have embarked on a project to evaluate the effectiveness of Boost Reading, developed by Amplify. Boost Reading is a supplemental digital reading program that provides personalized instruction targeting decoding, language comprehension, and reading comprehension. The Boost Project will study program effectiveness on different reading, language, and comprehension outcomes, generally and for subgroups of underserved students, and the extent to which variability in effects can be explained by patterns of usage. Beginning in 2025, the Boost Project is being run as a randomized control trial in partnership with Amplify and school districts across the country. This research will examine the effects of these technologies on different literacy skills and for learners with different strengths and needs. 

More information can be found at the Institute of Education Sciences

CLAVES Project

CLAVES stands for Cultivating Linguistic Awareness for Voice and Equity in Schools. Drs. Rebecca Silverman (Stanford University), Patrick Proctor (Boston College), and Jeffrey Harring (University of Maryland) have worked together for over a decade to identify areas of language that are associated with literacy. In partnership with schools in Massachusetts and Maryland, these researchers developed an intervention approach for upper elementary school students that focuses on supporting linguistic awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension through text-based language instruction, discussion, and writing. The intervention includes supports for English Learners in particular. In 2020, this research team began a 5-year project to study the effects of the intervention in supporting student language, literacy, and writing development. 

More information can be found at CLAVES and the Institute of Education Sciences. 

Understanding Curriculum Adoption and Coaching Supports

This study is examining the process of a new ELA curriculum adoption in San Francisco Unified School District's schools, and the role of the coaching network has played. We will be analyzing data from classrooms, teachers, and coaches to understand how teachers have been implementing the new materials as well as the ways the coaches have been part of the support. 

We hope to understand how a large school district's curriculum adoption process is rolled out and the range of supports and challenges that arises for teachers and coaches. We plan to share our findings with the district to help their future curriculum adoptions as well as the field for others to learn from this case study. We will not be making any individual teacher or coaches claims. We will be providing findings on what types of supports were helpful at different school sites

Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR)

The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading is an online platform for assessing foundational reading skills. ROAR consists of a suite of measures that have been validated K-12 in over 20,000 students across 20 states; each measure is delivered through an online platform, is fully automated, and does not require a test administrator. ROAR rapidly provides precise indices of reading ability with greater precision than many standardized, individually-administered reading assessments. Powered by the Rapid Online Assessment Dashboard (ROAD), ROAR integrates with most rostering systems including Clever and ClassLink so can be deployed to a whole district with a click of a button and provides instructionally informative score reports to teachers in real time as students complete the assessments. Read more about the unique Research Practice Partnership model that is the foundation of ROAR’s mission. The Stanford Reading & Dyslexia Research Program aims to investigate the factors contributing to reading difficulties including dyslexia. By developing and rigorously validating automated assessment tools that enable large-scale data collection, and bridge research and practice, we can help researchers and educators understand and support the diversity of learners.

More information can be found on ROAR’s website at https://roar.stanford.edu/

Past Projects

Personalized Learning Environment (PLE)

The Personalized Learning Environment (PLE) project was a partnership between San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and Stanford University's Graduate School of Education that focused on empowering teachers as designers and students as agents and owners of their learning. The K-5 PLE schools sought to create models for technology-enabled, personalized learning environments that transform student learning across SFUSD with a focus on designing learning environments that benefitted all students. The research helped us document and share teaching practices that support students’ reading and writing development through the use of technology. Through this research, other teachers within SFUSD learned more effective ways to develop their students’ literacy skills.

Ravenswood Reads

Ravenswood Reads, a service-learning based tutoring program, has partnered Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service with the Graduate School of Education and the Ravenswood City School District (RCSD) since 1982. The program offers tutor training and facilitates reading tutoring at schools in the RCSD using an approach designed and studied (2006) by Connie Juel and Julie Wilson. Tutors meet youth in grades K-3 for one-on-one, individualized instruction. In response to pandemic protocols, the 2020- 2021 program operated as a solely online tutoring program. All training and tutoring took place online using Zoom as a communication tool and various online tools to present lessons to children. During the summer of 2022, we expanded the number of students that were tutored, and we tried a hybrid approach to tutoring where half of the students had remote tutors that they interacted with through Zoom and the other half were in person. In 2023, the tutoring was all in person and we piloted a program where high school students were trained as tutors. We have been engaging in research over the past few years to examine the impact that the various approaches to tutoring have had on students' literacy growth as well as the influence on the tutors.

More information can be found at Ravenswood Reads

Sesame Workshop Partnership Project

The Primary School and Sesame Workshop have partnered to share innovative curriculum with early childhood educators.

High quality early childhood education has lifelong benefits in areas such as educational attainment, income level, and quality of life (Allee-Herndon et al., 2019; Garcia, 2015; Reardon, 2013). However, the quality of early childhood education programs is highly variable and many programs that serve low-income families are under- resourced (Melnik et al., 2017). While a range of policy and practice changes are needed to address this problem, an open-source, research-based, high quality early childhood curriculum with accompanying professional development and family connections is one of the major building blocks needed to ensure all children have access to the high-quality early childhood education they deserve (Wechsler,et al., 2016).

In response to this need, the Sesame Workshop, in partnership with The Primary School and experts in early childhood education, has developed an early childhood curriculum called Social Emotional Literacy Foundations or S.E.L.F. for 3 and 4 year olds that integrates attention to language and literacy and social emotional learning with a whole child, culturally sustaining, trauma-informed, multimedia-infused approach. Developing language and literacy is critical for young children as these skills underlie academic success across the content areas (NELP, 2008). Social emotional development is perhaps even more important because children need to be able to develop healthy identities, manage emotions, empathize with others, and establish supportive relationships to thrive in school and beyond (CASEL, 2020).

During the 2021-22 school year Dr. Rebecca Silverman and her team from Stanford University's Graduate School of Education partnered with Sesame Workshop to study the implementation of the S.E.L.F curriculum in 2 preschool programs. Through surveys, observations, and interviews of the teachers, we found the program to be highly supportive of teachers and students. The Read-Alouds were well implemented and valued, the teachers widely used the social-emotional strategies from the curriculum, and the curriculum themes often were extended during Center time to expand student learning.