![[Table of Contents]](/icons/up.gif){kind=icon}
| Rural Scholls Reading Project (RSRP). An instructional intervention and staff development program designed to improve reading instruction in elementary schools, thereby improving students' strategic reading abilities. |
Audience Approved by PEP for students in grades K-6.
Description Rural Schools Reading Project (RSRP) addresses the access time and cost challenges of sustained, effective staff development in rural schools through the formation of school-based professional development leadership teams and integrated use of telecommunications technologies, both of which facilitate an innovative instructional intervention: strategic reading. With this approach, reading is taught as a thinking process, thus students and teachers learn how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their reading and instruction. Strategic reading stresses the interaction of text, context, and learner through the use of prior knowledge, text structure, inference, word meaning, and metacognition. This instructional approach focuses on building knowledge base and expertise within a school and across schools via face-to-face interactions and telecommunications. RSRP materials are designed for use in professional development activities and include a guidebook, audio tapes, a videotape, and overhead transparencies. The materials demonstrate the use of strategic reading with students, explain how to create an effective leadership team, and describe an implementation process designed to help the leadership team introduce strategic reading to school staffs.
Evidence of Effectiveness Analysis of audio recordings demonstrates that RSRP teachers use strategic reading instructional strategies approximately twice as often as non-RSRP teachers, and three-year RSRP teachers show higher levels of using strategic reading techniques than teachers in the project for one or two years. RSRP students score significantly higher than non-RSRP students on a reading strategies test.
Requirements RSRP implementation requires the Strategic Reading Project "basic kit" which consists of a handbook guide to planning, implementation, and evaluation; overhead transparencies for use in professional development sessions; a videotape and six (6) audio tapes illustrating classroom-based reading instruction. Additional products and services, including on-site and telephone technical assistance as well as evaluation services, are also available. A two-day RSRP preparation workshop is recommended for staff developers before specific planning for the program's first year begins. For each school, RSRP requires a video cassette recorder and TV, and audio cassette recorder.
Costs To start the project, schools need at least one "basic kit" as described above at a cost of $525. Additional handbook guides are $32.50 each. An introductory, one-day orientation workshop is highly recommended, at a cost of $500 plus expenses (travel, lodging, and food). Optional products and services include audio seminars ($15 connect fee plus $10 per person per seminar); technical assistance by telephone ($40 per hour); and on-site technical assistance (one trainer, $500 per day plus travel, food, and lodging expenses).
Services In addition to the above materials and training, follow-up consultation is available.
Developmental Funding: OERI Regional Educational Laboratory Rural Education Initiative.
PEP No. 91-15R (4/8/91)
-###-
[Writers Project, The]