Department of Education June 24, 2005 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

In accordance with the Privacy Act of 1974, as amended, the Department of Education (Department) publishes this notice of a new system of records entitled ``Evaluation of the Impact of Supplemental Literacy Interventions in Freshman Academies'' (18-13-12). This evaluation, which is also called the Adolescent Literacy Project, has been commissioned by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance at the Department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES). It is being conducted by MDRC in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research (AIR). IES has been collaborating with the Department's Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) to coordinate the study of supplemental literacy interventions within OVAE's Smaller Learning Communities (SLC) program. The study will address the following questions: (1) Do specific supplemental reading programs that support personalized and intensive instruction for striving ninth-grade readers significantly improve reading proficiency? (2) What are the effects of supplemental reading programs on in- school outcomes such as attendance and course-taking behavior, and on longer-term outcomes such as student performance on State assessments in the tenth or eleventh grade? (3) Which students benefit most from participation in the programs? The system will contain information about two cohorts of approximately 3,200 high school freshmen each in SLCs in eight to twelve school districts yet to be determined. Half of these students will be participants in a supplemental literacy program, and half will be in a control group. The system will include these students' names, addresses, demographic information such as race/ethnicity, age, gender, and educational background, their results on literacy assessments, some of their school records data such as attendance, state test results, course performance, and classes taken, and their responses to a survey about their attitude toward reading and their reading and writing activities during the school year. The system will also include responses to survey and interview questions from teachers of these students, and possibly other school staff working with the literacy classes, about their backgrounds and the supplemental literacy interventions.