Evaluation of the Pathway to Academic Success Project

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SRI studied the effectiveness of a promising program focused on secondary students’ academic English skills. 

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Even after mastering conversational English, English learners often struggle with academic English, negatively impacting their educational outcomes. SRI conducted a 4-year randomized controlled trial (RCT) to estimate the effectiveness of the Pathway to Academic Success Project, a promising program focused on secondary students’ academic English skills. 

The Pathway Project is a teacher professional development program designed to enhance classroom literacy instruction to prepare multilingual learners and their peers in high-need schools to be successful in core academic subjects and to meet the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

The program and SRI’s first evaluation were funded through a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3) validation grant. Based on promising results from the i3 study in improving student achievement, the UCI Writing Project received a federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Expansion Grant to extend capacity to deliver Pathway professional development to new sites and in new contexts.

In support of this grant, SRI conducted a random assignment evaluation of the Pathway Project in grades 7–11, over the course of three school years (2019/20, 2020/21, and 2021/22). Despite disruptions to program implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic, SRI found that the Pathway Project led to positive, statistically significant impacts on students’ writing.

The size, rigor, and independence of these studies provide a strong evidence base to support the Pathway Project’s effectiveness in improving secondary students’ academic writing at scale and in diverse contexts.