The Science of Reading research points to the need to teach the key skills and knowledge for literacy in a systematic and explicit way. Between 2010 and 2012, Joy Allcock worked with teachers at Titahi Bay School in Porirua, to do just that. Using assessments to understand both students’ and teachers’ prior knowledge they changed the way literacy was taught in the first three years at school, with remarkable results. The results of this project were published in the NZ Ministry of Education Gazette in 2013. You can read about them here

Because of these results, Professor James Chapman (Massey University) designed a larger, more robust study to see if the results could be replicated in other schools. This was the Shine Literacy Project.