BPA is partnering with the American Institutes for Research and the Lewin Group on a four-year evaluation of explicit literacy instruction in adult ESL programs. This evaluation is a random assignment study commissioned by the Institute for Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. It will involve up to fifteen adult ESL programs in various locations in the U.S. Within these programs, some teachers will be assigned to provide explicit literacy instruction and other teachers will continue to teach regular ESL classes, which usually do not include explicit literacy instruction.

BPA's role in this project is concentrated in three areas. First, BPA staff will participate in site recruitment and in an implementation study of a pilot test of the explicit literacy curriculum. Second, BPA staff will design and operate a web-based data system for intake data collection and random assignment. This data system will automatically assign individual students to a program or control group status and will be linked to an automatic participation data collection system for evaluation and monitoring purposes. Finally, BPA will lead the impact analysis for this project.