Our History
The Pathway Project is a literacy intervention developed by the UCI Writing Project at the University of California, Irvine that takes a cognitive strategies approach to teaching text-based argument writing. The project provides ongoing, sustained professional development to prepare English language arts and English language development teachers to explicitly teach, model, and scaffold guided instruction in the cognitive strategies (or thinking tools) that research indicates experienced readers and writers access when they construct meaning. The primary goal is to prepare all students, but especially students in high needs schools and mainstreamed ELs, to become strategic readers able to analyze and interpret complex texts and analytical writers capable of developing well reasoned argument essays supported with textual evidence.
Research from the Pathway Project is cited in the IES Practice Guide Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School (Baker et al., 2014). Additionally, four of the fifteen research studies showcased in the IES Practice Guide Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively (Graham et al., 2016) are Pathway Project studies. Although, all of the Pathway research has been conducted with students in grades 6 and above, teachers from grades K-5 have successfully implemented the Pathway cognitive strategies approach in their classrooms (see Thinking Tools for Young Readers and Writers: Strategies to Promote Higher Literacy in Grades 2-8, Olson et al., 2018).
Evidence-based Cognitive Strategy Instruction that Works
The Pathway Project draws from both cognitive and sociocultural theory by focusing on cognitive strategy use as a vehicle for higher level thinking, using an apprentice model where the teacher serves as a senior member of a learning community, providing a wide array of procedural tools to enhance cognitive strategy use, and promoting collaboration among teachers, between teachers and students, and among students to foster a community of writers. It is also grounded in a number of evidence-based practices which research has found to be effective, including strategy instruction, planning and goal setting, prewriting activities, emulating models, procedural facilitation (graphic organizers), sentence instruction, formative feedback, and revision instruction (Graham et al., 2023). In addition, it is a comprehensive writing program that takes a process approach to scaffolding activities before, during, and after reading and writing about texts (Graham et al., 2023).
Pathway’s Efficacy: Results from Previous Studies
Pathway began with an 8-year quasi-experimental longitudinal study in a large, urban district (98% Latinx, 84% Free and Reduced Price Lunch, 88% mainstreamed ELs) that yielded an average effect size of .34 for overall writing quality for students in grades 6-12 on a pre/post on-demand argument writing assessment across the eight years of implementation (Olson & Land, 2007). The project then received funding to conduct a cluster randomized controlled trial in the same district. Year 1 of that RCT (Kim et al., 2011) yielded an effect size of .35. Year 2 of the RCT for new, incoming students with teachers who received a second year of PD yielded an effect size of .67 (Olson et al., 2012). In both years of the study, there were statistically significant effects on the writing subtest of the state Standards Test (d = .10). The project received a grant to conduct an RCT in a neighboring school district for students in grades 7-12 which yielded significant and positive results (Olson et al., 2017; Year 1, d = .48; Year 2, d = .60). Tenth-grade ELs in the treatment in Year 2 passed the state High School Exit Exam at 30 percentage points higher than ELs in the control and 20 percentage points higher than the state pass rate (treatment = 57.9%; state = 38%). This strong record positioned the project for a scale-up study, which included four sites of a national literacy network in the Southern California region, all with large urban partner districts. Results were positive and significant for not only the holistic score (d = .32), but all four of the analytic scores: content (d = .31), structure (d = .29), fluency (d = .27), and conventions (d = .32) (Olson et al., 2020).