Some subscribers to Phys-L might be interested in "Re: What's the
Meaning of 'Direct Instruction'? #2" [Hake (2012b)]. The abstract
reads [Yes, despite the protestations of bc (whom rh thinks often
jumps the gun) the abstract lies ENTIRELY between the bracket lines
"*******". In print journals abstracts are conventionally in one
paragraph. But on the internet there's no need to conserve space so
abstracts can be placed in more easily read multi-paragraph form.]
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ABSTRACT: In response to my post "What's the Meaning of 'Direct
Instruction'?" [Hake (2012a) at <http://bit.ly/FOp16Y>], Jack Rotman
of the MathEdCC list wrote (paraphrasing):
"For those who look at direct instruction as an 'automatic bad
thing', I would point you to the results of the largest educational
research project every conducted in this country - 'Project Follow
Through.' Start at 'OVERVIEW: The Story Behind Project Follow
Through' [Grossen (1995/96)] to get some information."
Contrary to Bonnie Grossen's glowing account of "Project Follow
Through," Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (2000) in "An Elusive Science: The
Troubling History of Education Research" wrote [my CAPS]:
"SOME EXPERIMENTS ENDED INCONCLUSIVELY. ONE OF THESE was the 'planned
variation' strategy used in implementing "PROJECT FOLLOW THROUGH" in
the late 1960s . . . . . . . Although the Follow Through experiment
seemed promising at first, to the surprise of many observers THE
VARIABLES INVOLVED WERE SO DIFFICULT TO IDENTIFY AND CONTROL THAT
LESS WAS LEARNED THAN ANTICIPATED. Even if one could identify gains
and associate them with one rather than another plan for the delivery
of Follow Through services, one could not be sure that those gains
were a consequence of the Follow Through program as opposed to a
better teacher or some other variable. Partly as a result of such
problems scholars scrutinizing the same data, reached different
conclusions. . . . . . as education researcher David K. Cohen (1970)
concluded, all the Follow Through experiment really demonstrated was
that power in education was so decentralized that THE CONTROLS
NECESSARY FOR EXPERIMENTATION WERE VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO MAINTAIN."
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"But the important distinction is really not between the hard and the
soft sciences. Rather, it is between the hard and the easy sciences.
Easy-to-do science is what those in physics, chemistry, geology, and
some other fields do. Hard-to-do science is what the social
scientists do and, in particular, it is what we educational
researchers do. In my estimation, we have the hardest-to-do science
of them all! We do our science under conditions that physical
scientists find intolerable."
David Berliner (2002)
REFERENCES [URL's shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 19 March 2012.]
Berliner, D. 2002. "Educational research: The hardest science of
all," Educational Researcher 31(8): 18-20; online as a 49 kB pdf at
<http://bit.ly/GAitqc>.
Hake, R.R. 2012a. "What's the Meaning of 'Direct Instruction'? " on
the OPEN! AERA-L archives at <http://bit.ly/FOp16Y>. Post of 16 Mar
2012 13:59:51-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. This post initiated a
thread on MathEdCC that had grown to 19 posts at
<http://bit.ly/GCmxwt> on 20 March 10:05-0700. The abstract and link
to the complete post are also being transmitted to several
discussion lists and are on my blog "Hake'sEdStuff" at
<http://bit.ly/znXSXn> with a provision for comments.
Hake, R.R. 2012b. "Re: What's the Meaning of 'Direct Instruction'?
#2,"on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at <http://bit.ly/FPZ8my>.Post of 19
Mar 2012 14:24:12-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link
to the complete post are also being transmitted to several
discussion lists and are on my blog "Hake'sEdStuff" at
<http://bit.ly/GzNegZ> with a provision for comments.