Education That Works:
The Child is Always Right, Part Four
What Has the Child Taught Us in Thirty Years?

Edward L. Anderson, Ph.D.

Hundreds of experiments like these have been performed. What are the principles that have been uncovered? There are seven winners: No ambiguity, Small steps, Fluency, Feedback, Reinforcement, Generativity, and Mastery.⁽⁵⁾

1. No ambiguity: Every word of instruction (literally) must be tested, rewritten and retested at each stage on naive students until ambiguity has been eliminated as demonstrated by first-time learning by 80-90% of the students. Research shows that any ambiguity in communication will later appear as a student error. To this end, detailed, written scripts are used in teaching.

The teacher or an assistant reads from these scripts to groups of students, in the process asking them scripted questions rapidly enough to get instant unison responses from the entire group, about 12 responses per minute. Those who lag even slightly thereby pinpoint their specific weakness, which is immediately corrected in one-on-one contact.

Avoidance of ambiguity is so important that even those who wrote the scripts read from them themselves rather than risk untested words or phrases that might lead to ambiguity. As in biology, mutations are seldom of value.

2. Small Steps. Because of the requirement that there must be almost perfect learning after one presentation, new material must be introduced in carefully sequenced, very small steps. Errors are minimized because each student is initially placed and then moves continuously on a micro-level scale in which each level is only slightly more difficult than the last.

In passing, notice that these groupings are a far cry from “tracking” which is based on a gross cut–“he belongs in third grade math and she in fifth”–which categorizes a student for a full year if not forever; something clearly undesirable. In the elementary school I am describing, our students will constantly move between very fluid groups in each subject meeting in corners or in different rooms. The groupings change each day based on progress. Because each level is a minor increment and achieved easily, a child can be exposed to perhaps 50 levels in a school year. About 15% of the school day is spent like this.

In contrast, California requires that students be placed together, leading to classes in which 25 kids are being taught the same material, even though some may be well behind the others at any given time. The intent is praiseworthy – to prevent invidious comparison and damage to the child’s self-image. We agree with the intent! A continuous record of failure relative to one’s peers is indeed destructive to one’s development. It is a certain recipe for continued failure of the lower-level students, which in turn increases the likelihood of misbehavior, boredom, and eventual drop out. Unfortunately, California argues that our approach also violates their tracking criterion!

In passing, I notice that no one objects to tracking when the subject is athletics rather than intellectual achievement. When I was young I was tracked off of varsity teams and no one worried about inequitable treatment or damage to my ego. Those who oppose tracking still accept athletics.

If 80-90% of the group don’t learn on the first try, then, learning from the student, we cut the step in half, making two steps rather than one. If necessary, we’ll divide again until our 90% first-time learning criterion is met. In math, for example, there are nearly 300 individual steps beginning at learning to count and ending at pre-algebra functions.

Note that the 90% criterion is used as a test of the program design. The student must shortly become both fluent and 100% accurate.

The result of this process is that every student is continuously successful! This continuous success has been shown – guess what? – to improve the student’s “self-image” as demonstrated by standard measurements. Rather than deducing philosophically that good “self-image” is a prerequisite to learning success (as is commonly asserted today) we see that self-image may instead be the result of a continuous record of success. Even an armchair philosopher would guess that this is more likely than vice versa.

3. Fluency. The lay term that defines mastery. With it we recognize that the ability to rapidly and spontaneously recall, organize, and respond is a better sign of proficiency than hesitating or slow behavior, even if accurate. Think of fluency in typing. It is defined by rapidity, few mistakes, and automatic, unthinking response!

Children have taught us that fluency is both required for mastery and a critical test of learning success. A new step should only be presented after the current step becomes fluent, with the student giving rapid, frequent, and correct responses to all questions. We now know that accuracy, or percent correct, independent of rate of response, is an insufficient measure of learning; both accuracy and speed are essential.

We get fluent responses from all students by working first in groups with the teacher and then singly and in pairs to increase the rate of responding. Every student answers hundreds of pre-tested simple questions, in some cases using something like flash cards, and in others repeated practice with peers or monitors to increase the rate at which the student can, for example, count or set up word problems. About 70% of the school day is spent building fluency and homework is now totally unnecessary in elementary situations.

The data from these fluency exercises are recorded daily in each subject by the student, not the teacher, on an ingenious “Standard Celeration Chart.” This self-charting can begin even in kindergarten! The importance of this daily progress check, called “Precision Teaching,” cannot be overestimated.

The charts are designed so that both the student and the teacher can tell at a glance if a difficulty has appeared by the end of each day. This permits immediate remediation by the teacher on a specific skill rather than delay until a very gross test, a weekly exam or a mid term, reveals some gross difficulty. (If a problem goes unresolved, learning is impaired because the student hasn’t mastered the hierarchical skills prerequisite to the current material.) Testing and evaluation takes about 10% of the school day and recording and charting about 5%.

When we say fluent, we mean it! Fluency for legibly writing the numbers 0 to 9 is 160-180/minute. Few readers of this article can do this this well! My own rate of writing is about 120/minute, not 180. For single digit answers to single digit addition and subtraction problems, the rate is 80-100/minute. Our third graders perform at these levels!

Contrast this with teaching methods used today. The teacher may ask for an answer once a week. Usually those who are asked are already the most advanced students. The others are embarrassed and will waste time in giving wrong answers, so teachers avoid questioning precisely those who need the practice. Instead, answers are sought through occasional homework which requires perhaps ten to forty responses rather than hundreds. And those having difficulty often don’t do homework.

Note that attaining fluency also makes unnecessary today’s practice of “recycling”: the reteaching of the same skill, in perhaps third, fifth, and seventh grade. Instead the program structure guarantees that skills are mastered and never get rusty.

4. Feedback. Each individual’s program must be modifiable on a daily basis using the information from the Standard Celeration Charts. The teacher’s role is now that of diagnostician, a manager of learning. Like a doctor, he or she decides what is wrong and then applies a treatment from a systematic bag of skills.

5. Reinforcement. Good performance is constantly reinforced with praise and points toward individual and group rewards: stars, early recess etc. Unexpectedly, the curves that gradually appear as entries are made on Standard Celeration Charts create special shapes which the kids recognize. They invent fun fanciful names for these shapes and look for them and compare them. You compete with yourself to get a more desirable “jaws” curve than the dreaded “snowplow.” Again, the students taught us that doing their own charts, in itself leads to better performance. We didn’t predict it. The child is always right!

Gradually, of course, the extrinsic rewards which are used to encourage mastery of difficult basic tools–did you enjoy learning math tables? –give way to the “internalized” rewards from reading itself.

Note that this competition is not destructive. One student doesn’t “win,” leaving the others angry or frustrated. Everyone wins because the system is designed to force that result!

6. Generativity. Teaching time is precious, but several researchers have found that as little as 20 minutes per school day is spent in actual instruction. Several new tricks raise this time substantially.

But the kids taught us something else totally unexpected and of critical importance; a truly mastered repertoire (see later) unexpectedly creates out-of-context skills which previously had to be individually taught. This so-called “generativity” causes something new in teaching, “curriculum leaps.” For example, learning mathematical manipulations – how to add and subtract – is much easier than setting up word problems. As we all remember, it’s an entirely different skill! The kids taught us that when they learned whole number manipulation to fluency, then word problems with only whole numbers to fluency, we could then teach fraction manipulation to fluency, and find it unnecessary to teach fraction word problems separately. Students solved these problems perfectly the first time: They made a curriculum leap!

7. “Learning mastery.” Our definition is even more demanding than current school usage. We, of course, get superior performance immediately following instruction; that’s the 90%. But we then apply harder standards described by the acronym “R E A PS” which means verifying Retention after one month without further instruction; verifying student Endurance, the ability to resist distraction by performing continuously on-task for twenty minutes in the face of distraction (even with many ADHD kids); and demonstrating Application of the material to new situations; all to previously set Performance Standards.

We have defined all of these objectives ahead of time and we measure outcomes with tests, interviews and portfolio entries which must be completed both independently and fluently. Lastly, we use nationally standardized achievement tests to verify performance.

And now the results. These are programs that really work; three related strategies, each using all or part of our seven new principles:

Direct Instruction

Precision Teaching

The Morningside Model

Edward L. Anderson, Ph.D.
Ed Anderson was among the founders of the Cambridge Center,
and remains one of its most active supporters.
This paper is based upon a talk that Dr. Anderson gave on August 2, 1994,
sponsored by the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York.

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