Education   

Project Follow Through

Project Follow Through: A Case Study of Contingencies Influencing Instructional Practices of the Educational Establishment.
Cathy L. Watkins. (1997). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. ISBN 1-881317-04-8 (paper) 103 p.

Project Follow Through, originally conceived in 1967 as a social action program to extend Head Start into the primary grades, became an educational experiment aimed at finding effective methods for educating disadvantaged children. Follow Through, in effect, created a national learning laboratory, providing a unique opportunity to study the effectiveness of a variety of educational methods. Project Follow Through was the largest formal experiment ever conducted on educational practice; may be the largest study ever conducted on human subjects.

The results indicated that the Direct Instruction model and, to a lesser degree, the Behavior Analysis model provided viable solutions to the problem of teaching disadvantaged children. Yet the results of the Follow Through evaluation have been virtually ignored by the educational establishment.

Why is Project Follow Through hardly known? How come most colleges of education never mention it to students? Why is it ignored, even though it documented that some educational practices are much more effective than others? Why were both the study and the dissemination of its results watered down?

This monograph gives a case history of Project Follow Through and examines the factors that have led the educational establishment to ignore teaching methods that are effective in raising the academic achievement of disadvantaged children.

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