The AIM Coaching grant funded through the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the third phase in a program of work to improve literacy outcomes for middle school struggling readers and students with disabilities.
- Phase I (also funded by IES) included the successful evaluation of the Promoting Adolescents’ Comprehension of Text (PACT) intervention in social studies classes through a series of highly controlled randomized controlled trials that established PACT as impactful across a range of learners.
- Phase 2 (funded by the Office of Special Education Programs) extended PACT to science, social studies, and English language arts as a schoolwide Tier 1 model. Though students with disabilities benefited from the schoolwide implementation of PACT, we were struck by the difficulty teachers experienced sustaining practices over time and realized they needed ongoing support adapted to meet their learning and teaching needs.
- Phase 3, the current phase, focuses on developing AIM Coaching to provide ongoing professional development and support to teachers as they implement PACT. We believe that this ongoing professional development will lead to greater PACT implementation fidelity. This, in turn, will affect student literacy outcomes.
This work was supported by IES, U.S. Department of Education, through grant R324A200012 to the University of Maryland and The University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
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