A large scale implementation and cohort study of thinkSRSD

ThinkSRSD (Self-regulated Strategy Development) is based on a model of Karen Harris’s instructional SRSD that has been augmented by Charles Haynes’s sentence and word level instruction. ThinkSRSD incorporates two decades of design, iteration, testing, and refinement to make these evidence-based practices more readily usable for teachers. In order to analyze the efficacy of thinkSRSD for writing, a retroactive cohort study design was used. Cohorts of students whose teachers had received thinkSRSD training were compared to the previous cohorts in the same schools. The percentage of students who achieved proficiency or advanced on their state English Language Arts tests were used to measure the difference between groups. Out of the 98 schools and districts analyzed in the study, every single treatment school outperformed their control cohorts. On average, 6.972% more students reached grade-level ELA proficiency or advanced benchmarks in the treatment cohort compared to the control cohort (95% CI 5.64–8.29). The analysis yielded a Hedges’s g effect size of 0.34, suggesting a moderate positive benefit for the treatment intervention. Some grades show stronger patterns, while others are less certain. For example, grades 4–6 showed 95% CI range of 6.17%–14.95% mean improvement.