Precision Teaching & Literacy: The Proof is in the Pudding [VIDEO]

 

Welcome Richard McManus, Founder of The Fluency Factory in Hingham MA as a guest blogger on the Maloney Method website. Richard’s video reviews the data of the major empirical study supporting Precision Teaching as a measurement and decision-making system for teachers, therapists, homeschoolers and other education professionals.

A description of the The Sacajewea Project has been excerpted from Teach Your Children Well ,1998, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, Michael Maloney, 1998 ISBN 1-881317-06-4.

Undoubtedly, the best example of the effectiveness of Precision Teaching is to be found in its longest and most extensive study of skills development in schools – The Sacajewea Project. This project was conducted under the auspices of the U.S Dept of Education to validate the Precision Teaching model as a proven set of practices for both regular and special education settings. The Sacajewea Project was undertaken over a twelve year period and involved 153,000 children and 8,000 teachers in 44 states and three Canadian provinces. Like Project Follow Through it was a longitudinal, comparative study of methods that sought to improve student performances in basic curriculum.

As with Project Follow Through, standardized tests were administered to all subjects at the beginning and end of each year. The Sacajewea Project students were compared with students in the control groups of similar age, grade, and socio-economic level. The students in the project consistently scored anywhere between 20 and 40 percentile points higher than the control groups on these independently administered tests in reading, arithmetic and spelling. They also showed better retention over time and greater ability to transfer the use of their skills to new and more difficult tasks.”

The simple fact is that we already know and have known for many years how to quickly and effectively catch children up who have fallen behind. We know how to prevent children from becoming “at-risk of school failure” in the first place. We have ignored these methods to our peril and now have a high school student dropping out of school every 26 seconds, mostly because they have been brutalized by an archaic system which lacks any semblance of accountability.