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This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade reading teachers and 105 students (treatment n = 62; control n = 43) and in Year 2, one seventh-grade reading teacher and 87 students (treatment n = 44; control n = 43) from the same public school. In both years, results favored instructed students in word knowledge, lexical access, and morphological awareness on researcher-designed measures. In Year 2, small advances were also found for comprehension. Transcripts of lessons shed light on processes of developing representations of unfamiliar words.

The Pennsylvania Governor's School for International Studies is an intensive summer program designed to give talented high school students a challenging introduction to the study of international affairs. One focus of the evaluation seeks to understand the effect of the program on the students' perception of their knowledge concerning core issues. Across the long history of the program, a variety of measures were used (and subsequently discarded) to assess changes in knowledge and perception of competence. Four years ago the program instituted a retrospective pre-post design. Results from these years, indicate that these students have consistently overestimated their pre-test understanding of core competencies emphasized in the program and that they seem better able to assess their knowledge gains and their initial inflated sense of knowledge as a result of the program. This article offers an overview of the development, application, use and analysis of a retrospective pre-post instrument to address response shift bias.

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