• ABOUT US
• R&D DIVISIONS
• CAREERS
• NEWSROOM
• CONTACT US
• HOME

Evaluation of Michigan’s Striving Readers Program

As a subcontractor to the Michigan Department of Education (MDE), SRI was awarded a research grant to evaluate the effectiveness of FUSION Reading in improving struggling adolescents’ reading achievement and growth and to examine whether the FUSION Reading Program is implemented as the designers intended.

FUSION Reading was developed by researchers at the University of Kansas, Center for Research on Learning, who have partnered with MDE under the U.S. Department of Education’s Striving Readers grant to deliver FUSION training to teachers in nine Michigan middle and high schools. Independent from both the development and the implementation of FUSION, SRI can provide an unbiased account of the intervention’s effects on student outcomes.

SRI’s evaluation will answer the following questions:

1. What are the short-term effects of FUSION on the reading outcomes of struggling adolescent readers after 1 and 2 years?
2. For which students is FUSION most and least effective?
3. Does FUSION exert its effect on reading through improving students’ motivations to read?
4. In what ways are implementation factors (e.g., teachers’ use of the FUSION reading program, student dosage) associated with program impacts on reading outcomes?

(Michigan Department of Education, 2009-2013)

Key Staff

Principal Investigators: Jose Blackorby, Ellen Schiller

Staff: Sarah Greene, Harold Javitz, Keith Ben-Hanania Lenz, Regie Stites, Xin Wei