Episode 1: Where’s Your Evidence, Teacher? Straight Talk on Selecting Evidence-Based Practices for Adolescent Literacy

Educators are familiar with pressing students for textual evidence for their claims. But educators themselves are pressed to use evidence-based instructional practices, often with little guidance about where to look and how to evaluate that evidence. In this session, I present a research article I wrote, which examines the research base for the 2008 IES Practice Guide to Adolescent Literacy (Kamil et al., 2008) and compares it to a recent research synthesis on adolescent literacy (Baye et al., 2019). In the article, I show that the adolescent literacy research base has changed dramatically in the last 12 years. For one example, the 2008 IES guide deliberately avoided saying anything about disciplinary literacy, but research about disciplinary has exploded in the last ten years. In fact, it is now a core part of Ohio’s Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement. Certainly, a lot has changed, and educators can increase their effectiveness if they can integrate new adolescent literacy findings.

But how should educators do this? I share some ideas for who, what, when, where, why, and how educators can look for evidence about adolescent literacy. I’ll also share some examples of what this looks like, and some examples of high-quality research findings. You’ll walk away from this episode knowing who to talk to, what to look for, when the research publication date is important, where to look for, and how to read like a more seasoned pro.

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