Graduate School of Education Assistant Professor James S. Kim has received a $12.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3) Program to study a program that seeks to improve the reading comprehension of children from low-income families.

This grant, along with an additional $2.8 million in funding from the private sector, will be used to validate Project READS (Reading Enhances Achievement During the Summer), an initiative that encourages summer reading and provides children with books.

Kim will work with Communities in Schools, a national non-profit drop-out prevention organization, and a team of colleagues including Thomas White, senior research scientist at the University of Virginia Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, and Jonathan Guryan, associate professor at the Institute for Policy Research of Northwestern University.

Kim said he and his colleagues will evaluate and gradually scale-up the implementation of Project READS in North Carolina over the next 5 years, covering roughly 8,000 students from 65 high-poverty schools.

For the project, third to fifth graders from the selected schools will be given books that match their interests and reading level, which is determined through computer algorithms. Parents and teachers will be trained to provide support, such as reading aloud with the children and teaching good comprehension techniques. In previous experiments with Project READS in California, Kim and his team found that comprehension strategies played a key role in enhancing children’s reading ability.

“Just giving the kids books doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference,” Kim said. “It is really the teachers’ ‘scaffolding’ piece that’s contributing to comprehension above and beyond.”

According to Kim and White, the additional instruction is what distinguishes their project from others with similar purposes.

Kim and his colleagues are optimistic as to what their project could be able to achieve.

“It is a program that really appeals to practicing educators,” White said. “When we talked to teachers who have been trying to find a solution to the kids’ reading problem, they immediately sense that [Project READS] might work.”

Kim and his team hope the project will make a lasting impact.

“A lot of innovation of education dies when the organization runs out of money, or when a new superintendent comes in and wants to do something else,” Kim said. “By working with an organization like [Communities in Schools] which will be around for a long time and always be raising funds, we hope to see if the innovation can last beyond the project.”