From 2021 to 2024, Dr. Joshua Lawrence led a research partnership with a school district in the United States focused on strengthening literacy instruction for adolescent learners. This collaboration culminated in the creation of the SCALE dataset, a unique collection of instructional, coaching, and student learning data aimed at understanding how schools can build sustained capacity to support struggling readers across the middle and high school years.
Dr. Lawrence is a developmental psychologist and educational researcher who currently serves as a visiting scholar at the Digital Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine. His research integrates language and literacy development with large-scale data collection and school-based implementation work. Over the past decade, his efforts have supported teachers, school leaders, and researchers in better understanding how to design equitable literacy ecosystems for all learners.
The SCALE model—School-wide Capacity-building for Adolescent Literacy and Engagement—combines insights from educational psychology, implementation science, and literacy research. It emphasizes professional collaboration among teachers, shared access to practical strategies, and ongoing use of data to support students who learn best in ways not always addressed by traditional instruction. The SCALE dataset captures both the development of this model and its impact in real-world school settings.
As part of his work at the Digital Learning Lab, Dr. Lawrence is using the SCALE dataset to explore new approaches to AI-supported instructional coaching, data-informed professional development, and tailored reading supports for multilingual learners and students with learning differences.
To learn more about Dr. Lawrence’s current work, please visit his personal website or his faculty profile at the University of Oslo, where he is a professor in the Department of Teacher Education and School Research.
We welcome visitors who are interested in this work. If you would like to connect or learn more about the SCALE model, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.