This chapter discusses the effectiveness of Direct Instruction in education, featuring insights from a guest with a background in sociology and data analysis. The conversation highlights the contrast between evidence-based practices and entrenched educational philosophies, revealing the emotional resistance faced by empirical methods in the learning community.
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Hello, and welcome back to the Direct Instruction podcast. My name is Dr. Zach Groshell, and today we have a fantastic episode about a half-century of research on the effectiveness of Direct Instruction with Jean Stockard. Dr. Stockard is a distinguished quantitative sociologist, and the author of the book, All Students Can Succeed.
One of the problems we face in education is that everybody claims that their program is “research-based”. These days, most curriculum publishing companies have to show some proof that their program works if they are to make states’ lists of approved programs. The thing is, the determination that the program “works” is often made on the basis of the results of a single study. When you go over to the publisher’s website and click past all the testimonials and flashy graphics, you find that the single study showed small, mixed, and statistically insignificant effects, in favor of their program. Because these studies often include intensive professional development workshops and additional resources for the teachers who received the new program, it is questionable that students’ learning gains can be attributed only to the use of the program, and not to the teacher training that was employed or the extra resources they were provided.
So, I wanted to dig in to the research base of Direct Instruction to see how it compares, and Jean Stockard seemed like the researcher I needed to talk to. She and her colleagues are the authors of the 2016 Meta-Analysis on Direct Instruction Curricula, which contained 328 studies involving 413 study designs and almost 4,000 effects. What I found interesting was that, while the authors knew before they started the project that a lot of research had accumulated over the half-century, they were stunned at the task that lay before them due to the sheer magnitude of research on DI. And when they went to crunch the numbers, the results were so strong and so consistent that they checked and re-checked their findings to make sure they were correct. No matter how they spliced it, they simply could not find any situation in which DI did not work.
This episode is brought to you by NIFDI, or the The National Institute for Direct Instruction. Registration is open for the National Direct Instruction Conference in Eugene, Oregon this summer. Whether you are new to Direct Instruction, or are looking for training on Administrative Leadership, Coaching, and Becoming an Effective DI Trainer, this is the conference for you. I’ve provided the links to register in the show notes, and I encourage you to sign up for what is the most comprehensive DI training available anywhere.
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