Teach Effectively!

Zig Engelmann’s original plan for publishing his recollections of the Follow Through Project called for PDFs of chapters to be available on Zigsite.com for two weeks each. In response to people who learned of their availability too late, he as created “something of a curtain call.” Get ‘em while you can!

DURING THE WEEK OF MONDAY, MARCH 12, ALL CHAPTERS WILL BE ON FOR ONE WEEK, THROUGH SUNDAY MARCH 18. Then, for sure, they will not return.

Good news for those who discovered too late that Zig Engelmann was publishing a history of his time in education. The chapters were available only briefly (2 weeks each) but Zig’s making the entire product available again briefly.

If you missed downloading any of the earlier chapters of “The Outrage of
Project Follow Through,” Zig is re posting ALL chapters on Monday, March 12
about 8am pacific and will leave them up until Monday, March 19, around 8am
pacific.

Bryan
Bryan Wickman,
Executive Director
Association for Direct Instruction

Save the dates. Get it while it’s free. Go to zigsite.com.

Linda Seebach, an editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain News, published a column recounting the story of Zig Engelmann’s book, The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 Million Failed Kids Later. Here’s her lead.

I’ve been reading one of the most important education books you’ll likely never have a chance to read. It’s by Siegfried Engelmann, and it’s about Direct Instruction, the structured curriculum he began to develop in the early 1960s, how DI participated in a federal study called Project Follow Through, and how the results of that study – which demonstrated that DI produced superior outcomes for at-risk children – were essentially disappeared from the educational landscape by hostile educators and bureaucrats.

It’s good to see that some of the mainstream press is picking up this story. Kudos to Ms. Seebach. Link to her column.

Trina Spencer and Tim Slocum of Utah State University report that they are hoping to develop a line of research on using Direct Instruction (DI) with children with Autism. As a first step, they are creating a comprehensive catalog of current DI practices with this population. They hope to use the results of their survey to plan a series of research projects on the topic.

Tim sent this set of requests:

• If you use DI with children with Autism we ask that you take a few minutes to complete the brief survey below and return it to Trina at tds [at] cc [dot] usu [dot] edu.
• If you know of others who use DI with this population please forward this message to them.
• If you are interested in collaborating on future research, please let us know. Please respond to Trina at tds [at] cc [dot] usu [dot] edu.

Link for downloading the survey.

I stumbled across a site that is touted as “Scientifically Based Research: A Link from Research to Practice” on the Web, created by Amanda VanDerHeyden, a professor in school psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara (CA, US). Although there are links to many materials and procedures she has developed, the site does not at this time provide links to procedures and practices available elsewhere.

I only had a chance to glance at the details of the site. It has sections for different academic areas (reading, writing, etc.) as well as assessment. It seems mostly focused on very young children. There are references to individual studies reported by Professor VanDerHeyden, and the procedures are similar to some that have more extensive scientific documentation of their value.

WARNING: The front end of this site employs a big dose of Flash, so there is a lot of waiting, even with a very high-speed connection. Readers may wish to bookmark the subordinate HTML pages so that they can go directly to them rather than having to load the Flash navigation page. It also opens pages in new windows, so an individual who uses a full-screen display for her browser (as do most Windows users) and explores the site thoroughly may have at least a half dozen windows open at the end of the visit.

Link to the GOSBR site, to Professor VanDerHeyden’s UCSB bio page

A couple of months ago over on LD Blog I posted an entry about Virginia Berninger’s (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, US) research on the effects of instruction on brain function. The University of Washington’s press office has another press release on the topic dated 8 February 2006. For those who are keeping score, this make the someteenth example of how systematic and explicit instruction causes changes in brain activity.

Link to the press release.