An English language and literacy acquisition validation randomized controlled trial: Study protocol

This paper presents a research protocol for a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design to determine the degree of impact that the ELLA-V intervention has across 75 randomly-assigned urban, suburban, and rural schools with a total of 14,400 students and 600 teachers at each of four grades, K-3, on ELLs' English oral language, reading, and literacy skills. Secondly, ELLA-V will examine the impact of high quality professional development (PD) provided for treatment teachers through virtual PD using Blackboard, Tegrity, Citrix GotoMeeting, and ThereNow classroom cameras versus typical PD provided by the districts to the control group teachers. An additional implementation study will examine treatment teachers' perceptions regarding the effectiveness of the virtual and face-to-face PD and mentoring feedback.