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With increasingly diverse students, schools and districts are under pressure to meet rigorous standards and raise student achievement in reading and literacy. Most teachers respond by differentiating their instruction to some extent, but not all scholars and educators agree on whether differentiated instruction works. This systematic review and meta-analysis seeks to determine the effects of Tier 1 differentiation, which is provided by the general education classroom teacher, on literacy outcomes. Distinguishing between designed differentiation and interactional differentiation, the authors provide multiple examples of content, process, and product differentiation in the context of literacy instruction. Reviewing more than 20 years of literacy research, the authors located 18 studies with 25 study cohorts. Outcomes include fluency, decoding, letter-word reading, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing achievement. The overall weighted mean effect size (g) was +0.13 (p = .002) with 88% of the individual point estimates being positive. Overall, the findings indicate that differentiated literacy instruction is an effective evidence-based practice at the elementary level. When teachers are supported to differentiate instruction, students have significantly higher literacy achievement scores, particularly for letter-word (g = +0.20, p = .014) and writing outcomes (g = +0.96, p < .001). The most successful programs took very different approaches to differentiation, including individualization, choice, and an alternate curriculum. However, across the studies, there was an alarming lack of information about the decision-making processes used to guide differentiation and there were no experimental or quasi-experimental studies on guided reading. This review may be helpful as schools clarify their vision for literacy differentiation.

We conducted a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of cooperative and collaborative learning to support enhanced literacy outcomes. Interventions considered were provided in regular education settings (i.e., not pull-out instruction) with students from Grades 2 through 12. Reviewing more than 30 years of literacy research, we located 18 intervention studies with 29 study cohorts. Included studies primarily used standardized assessments to report on students' reading, vocabulary, or comprehension achievement, which we analyzed separately. Overall, students had significantly higher literacy achievement scores when instructional interventions utilized cooperative and collaborative activity structures. The overall weighted mean effect sizes ranged from 0.16 to 0.22 (p < .01) with more than 94% of the point estimates being positive. Because cooperative or collaborative learning was always one of multiple intervention components, it was impossible to estimate the unique, added effects of cooperative/collaborative learning. Although the small number of eligible studies precludes any claims about the effectiveness of specific forms of grouping and the circumstances under which programs have more impact, our findings suggest that cooperative and collaborative grouping was a core component of effective literacy interventions, particularly at the elementary level.

Although a variety of research has investigated the use and benefits of home language in school settings, research on using translation to support school learning is scarce. With the goal of designing a differentiated and culturally relevant strategy that supports the reading of bilingual students, we worked with seventh-grade students in pull-out settings. After reading narrative texts, we invited students to collaboratively translate and evaluate thematically connected excerpts. Using distributed cognition and distributed expertise as a theoretical perspective, this qualitative case study shows that collaborative translation made student expertise visible and mediated the way that students participated and negotiated meaning.

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