School-wide literacy initiatives across the curriculum related to student achievement

The purpose of this quantitative study was to evaluate the effectiveness of literacy programs across the curriculum in secondary schools by determining if literacy initiatives lead to higher than expected performance when considering building free/reduced lunch levels. Teacher instruction, professional development, programs, and leadership were tested to determine whether they would serve as significant predictors for the residual performance score that enables one to control for poverty. A linear regression was used for all English/language arts scores for the 2015 spring results. This test was selected as it determined if there was a significant relationship---predictor variable (free and reduced lunch levels of the building) and one criterion variable (end of course assessment)---that would build a prediction equation. If significance was found, the remaining inferential tests used the residual difference between actual performance and predictive performance created by the prediction equation. Based on the findings, the building free and reduce lunch percentage does serve as a significant predictor of end of course assessment pass rate. Positive residual performance scores indicated the building was outperforming its peers when compared to other buildings with the same free and reduced lunch percentage, as scores were above the prediction line. The schools that were below the prediction line had a negative residual performance score and this indicated they were performing worse on the end-of-course assessments than their peers with the same free and reduced lunch percentage. The second test that was used was an independent samples t test. This test determined whether there was a significant difference on the residual performance scores between schools that had reported implementing a school-wide literacy initiative and their counterparts that had not done so. The study discovered there was no significant difference among schools implementing a comprehensive school-wide literacy initiative and schools not having one on the end-of-course assessment performance residual value. The third test that was used was a forward selection multiple regression to determine whether leadership, programs, instruction, or professional development can explain a significant amount of variance in the residual performance score. If significance was determined, then the predictor variables that explained this amount of variance were identified. The finding of this study is that programs, professional development, and leadership have no significance according to the performance residual score. The results of this study provide school leaders a better understanding of predictors to improve student achievement in literacy. This knowledge will prove useful to leaders to understand the importance of the predictors when it is compared to improving scores of the English/language arts end-of-course assessment. More specifically, this knowledge will help guide leaders with their decisions based on implementing a successful school-wide literacy program.