Teach Effectively!

Over on I Speak of Dreams, Liz has a nice post about the Precision Teaching Approach. There are several good links. (Liz knows her way around the Internet!) I first learned about PT as a teacher in the late 60s and early 70s when a couple of colleagues went to a workshop and came back with stacks of 6-cycle semi-log paper. Later, as a part of the LD Research Institute here at U.Va., I developed my own charting system for our teachers to use; I need to dig up the paper copy of this and scan it.

As a supplement to Liz’s links, here are a couple of other notes and comments (avec links):

• Carl Binder, Elizabeth Haughton, and Barbara Bateman have a good paper on fluency over on my U.Va. special education Web site.
• I tipped my hat to Og Lindsley a couple of times on LD Blog. Professor Lindsley was a progenitor of PT; along with folks like Tom Lovitt and others, Professor Lindsley encourage us to approach learning behaviors as free operants that could be directly measured and systematically increased and decreased. You can see some of Professor Lindsley’s papers on the topic at Precision Teaching Papers.
• PT was the fore-runner to “curriculum-based measurement” (CBM), which was developed and popularized by Stan Deno and colleagues, especially Phyllis Mirkin and Lynn Fuchs. They’ve done loads of good work and one can learn about it at these sites:
  • Research Institute on Progress Monitoring, where folks are developing a system of progress monitoring that can be used to evaluate the effects of various strategies for assessing learners’ progress in the general education curriculum
  • The National Center Student Progress Monitoring, which is a source of technical assistance and dissemination focused on to the implementation of scientifically systems for monitoring students’ progress.
• One of the most widely known variations on this theme is the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), developed by Roland Good and Ruth Kaminsky; DIBELS is used is many schools to track students’ progress in beginning reading.
• The good folks at Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies have additional valuable content about PT, too.
• Rick Kubina maintains a mailing list for discussions about PT as well a helpful Web site, Precision Teaching Resources.
• Tracey Hall and Missy Mengel provide a helpful comparison of different approaches to curriculum-based evalution, including PT as well as curriculum-based assessment, CBM, and DIBELS; they have a host of good links (some slightly out of date, though [I know how this can happen]).

Please feel free to add other connections and notes.