The Impacts of a Scalable Intervention on the Language and Literacy Development of Rural Pre-Kindergartners Andrew Mashburn Portland State University Laura M. Justice The Ohio State University Anita McGinty University of Virginia Laura Slocum The Ohio State University Read It Again (RIA) is a curriculum for pre-kindergarten (pre-K) classrooms that targets children’s development of language and literacy skills. A cluster randomized trial was con- ducted in which 104 pre-K classrooms in the Appalachian region of the United States were randomly assigned to one of three study conditions: Control (n ¼ 30), RIA only (n ¼ 35), or RIA with expanded professional development components (n ¼ 39). This study tested the impacts of RIA on six measures of children’s (n ¼ 506) language and literacy development. There was a significant positive impact of RIA on print concepts, and the impacts of RIA on print knowledge and alphabet knowledge were significantly stronger in classrooms with lower-quality literacy instruction. There were no impacts of RIA on children’s language development and no impacts of the professional development components. Implications of the findings for implementing scalable, effective strategies to improve key school readi- ness outcomes for children from economically-disadvantaged backgrounds are discussed. This study was conducted to determine the impacts of Read It Again! (RIA; Justice & McGinty, 2009), a low-cost, preschool language and literacy curriculum designed for scalability, such that it could be used with large numbers of teachers at very low costs and with minimal intensive training in its implementation. For the present purposes, RIA impacts were examined among 506 pre-kindergartners attending early childhood programs in rural, Appalachian communities; the programs served children considered to be at-risk for future academic challenges due to socio-economic disadvantages. As a potential means to reduce these risks, RIA provides teachers with a 30-week, whole-class curriculum that targets children’s development of vocabulary, narrative expression, print knowledge, and phonological awareness skills; each of which is consist- ently linked to children’s later development of word rec- ognition and reading comprehension skills (average correlation > 0.40; National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). These four skills are often under-developed among children experiencing socio-economic risks during the preschool years (e.g., Cabell, Justice, Konold, & McGinty, 2011), yet these skills are amenable to change through the use of systematic and explicit instructional practices and programs (e.g., Justice & Ezell, 2002; Ukrainetz, Cooney, Dyer, Kysar, & Harris, 2000; van Kleeck, Gillam, & McFadden, 1998; Whitehurst et al., 1994). Furthermore, causally interpretable research designs show that improvements in these skills, Address correspondence to Andrew Mashburn, Portland State University, Department of Applied Psychology, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751. E-mail: mashburn@pdx.edu APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, 20(1), 61–78, 2016 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1088-8691 print=1532-480X online DOI: 10.1080/10888691.2015.1051622