Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively

James S. Kim, Ph.D., is an associate professor 

of education at the Harvard Graduate School 

of Education. He studies the effectiveness of 

literacy reforms and interventions in improving 

student outcomes. Dr. Kim leads the Project for 

Scaling Effective Literacy Reforms, a research-

based collaborative initiative to identify and  

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scale adaptive solutions for improving chil-

dren’s literacy learning opportunities and 

outcomes. He is an expert in conducting 

randomized field trials to evaluate, improve, 

and scale evidence-based literacy reforms. He 

is the principal investigator of an Investing in 

Innovation Fund (i3) validation study to evalu-

ate Reading Enhances Achievement During Sum-

mer (READS for Summer Learning), a low-cost, 

large-scale summer reading intervention for 

improving reading comprehension outcomes in 

high-poverty elementary schools. He has also 

led experimental studies of several widely used 

teacher professional development interventions 

for improving reading and writing outcomes 

in the elementary and secondary grades, 

including the Pathway Project, Teacher Study 

Groups, and the Strategic Adolescent Reading 

Intervention. He serves on the editorial boards 

of Reading Research Quarterly and the Journal 

of Educational Psychology and was the program 

chair for the 2014 annual meeting of the Soci-

ety for Research on Educational Effectiveness.