Teach Effectively!

Over on D-Ed Reckoning there is a post about an odor emanating from education research. The item was picked up in a post on NCLBLog: Let’s Get it Right, a product of the American Federation of Teachers, and I dropped a comment on that one about the evidence about effectiveness in special education practices.

Faithful readers of Teach Effectively (both of you!) know that I champion the idea that effectiveness can be assessed with strong empirical research and that data coming from those studies can be aggregated to assess relative effectiveness of educational practices. I’m republishing here parts of a Web site I created in the ’90s on this topic.

If you’re comfortable with the idea of meta-analysis, jump to the section labeled “Practices.” For a review of how to make those evaluations, please consult the links in “Introductory Materials” (in sequence).

• Introductory Materials
  • Title Page
  • Evidence
  • Prototype Study
  • Data from the Prototype Study
  • Calculating Effect Sizes
  • Relative Effect Sizes
  • Standards for Comparison
• The Practices
  • Special Class Placement
  • Perceptual Training
  • Feingold Hyperactivity Diet
  • Modality-Based Reading Instruction
  • Social Skills Training for Students with Learning Disabilities
  • Social Skills Training for Students with Emotional or Behavioral Disorders
  • Medication for Students with Mental Retardation
  • Reducing Class Size
  • Psycholinguistic Training
  • Peer Tutoring
  • Computer-assisted Instruction
  • Stimulant Treatment of Hyperactivity
  • Early Intervention
  • Cognitive-behavioral Treatment of Adolescent Depression
  • Formative Evaluation of Students’ Progress
  • Cognitive-behavioral Treatments
  • Psychotherapy (including behavior modification)
  • Direct Instruction (big DI)
  • Treatment of Classroom Behavior Problems
  • Decreasing Disruptive Behavior
  • Teaching Reading Comprehension
  • Mnemonic Strategies Instruction

Please review the published papers that examine this same literature (see Forness, Kavale, Blum, & Lloyd, 1997; Lloyd, Forness, & Kavale, 1998). There are many other meta-analyses that I’ve not had a chance to drop into this format. I need to create a new template and update the contents…arrrgh.