Urban Study Partnerships Start to Yield Research Results

First reports analyze efforts to teach students 'academic vocabulary'

A set of in-depth partnerships between researchers and the nation’s large school systems are bearing fruit, both in new studies and greater insights into how districts and researchers can work together.

The Senior Urban Education Research Fellowship program released two reports from the second of three rounds of studies this month in Washington at the annual legislative conference of its sponsor, the Council of the Great City Schools. Researchers associated with Washington-based Strategic Education Research Partnership or SERP are developing tools and interventions in Boston and San Francisco to help middle and high school teachers, particularly those in science, social studies, and other content areas, incorporate academic vocabulary into their teaching.

One report describes efforts in the 56,300-student Boston district to develop Word Generation , a series of 15-minute daily academic-vocabulary lessons and activities that could be incorporated into different courses. With the CGCS grant, Catherine E. Snow, the head field researcher for SERP and an education professor at Harvard University, and Harvard postdoctoral fellow Joshua F. Lawrence dug into data on effectiveness...