GOSA Releases 2015-2016 End-of-Year Evaluation Report for the Growing Readers Program

Today, the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement released the end-of-year evaluation report for the Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA) Growing Readers Program (GRP). The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement’s Research and Evaluation unit worked with program staff to develop an evaluation plan and conduct the evaluation. The End-of-Year Report includes:

• A summary of the GRP’s mission and goals,
• A profile of participating schools,
• A description of the evaluation methodology,
• A discussion of the findings for each evaluation instrument, and
• Recommendations for future practice.

The RESA Growing Readers Program (GRP) is a K-3 literacy professional learning grant administered through the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement. The goal of the program is to increase the percentage of students reading at or above grade level by the end of third grade by providing consistent, high-quality professional learning to teachers on effective reading instructional strategies. Each of Georgia’s 16 RESAs identified one or more reading specialist(s) to provide professional learning to three to six schools in the RESA. The 2015-2016 school year was the first year of the GRP. The program served 61 schools, approximately 230 teachers, and over 4,000 students across the state.

During the 2015-2016 school year, all sixteen RESAs successfully collaborated with one another to deliver universal professional learning to teachers, coaches, and administrators on effective reading instructional practices. Over 90% of program participants feel the GRP is valuable to improving reading instruction practices, and the percentage of teachers who feel at least proficient in conferring with students, administering and using assessment data, and selecting targeted interventions for students grew from 40% to almost 100% by the end of the year. Despite large variability in student performance due to the variety of assessments used by participating schools, the percentage of GRP students meeting national benchmarks grew by 6 percentage points from 39% to 45%.

Please click here to read the Executive Summary for the 2015-2016 Growing Readers Program End-of-Year Evaluation Report.

Please click here to read the full 2015-2016 Growing Readers Program End-of-Year Evaluation Report.