Follow Through

Novo ano, velhas práticas aparentemente mais proveitosas... Post e comentários no blogue do Paulo Guinote a não perder.

Project Follow Through (FT) remains today the world's largest educational experiment. It began in 1967 as part of President Johnson's ambitious War on Poverty and continued until the summer of 1995, having cost about a billion dollars. Over the first 10 years more than 22 sponsors worked with over 180 sites at a cost of over $500 million in a massive effort to find ways to break the cycle of poverty through improved education.

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That the scientific knowledge we have about education needs to be better disseminated is clear. At the very least the models that failed, even to the point of producing lower levels of performance, should not be the educational models being adopted in public policy.

(Pois claro que não...)

I, personally, would not advocate mandating Direct Instruction, even though it was the clear winner. I don't think that mandates work very well. But every educator in the country should know that in the history of education, no educational model has ever been documented to achieve such positive results with such consistency across so many variable sites as Direct Instruction. It never happened before FT, and it hasn't happened since.