This category examines reading interventions, curricula, and outcomes and include students in pre-K through 5th grade. Direct Instruction curricula include: DISTAR Reading, Reading Mastery, Corrective Reading, Horizons, and Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.
This category examines reading interventions, curricula, and outcomes and include students in grades 6-12. Direct Instruction curricula include: DISTAR Reading and Corrective Reading.
This category examines mathematics interventions, curricula, and outcomes and include students in pre-K through 5th grade. Direct Instruction curricula include: Connecting Math Concepts
This category examines mathematics interventions, curricula, and outcomes and include students in grades 6-12. Direct Instruction curricula include: Corrective Mathematics
This category examines writing interventions, curricula, and outcomes and include elementary and secondary students. Direct Instruction curricula include: Reasoning and Writing and Expressive Writing
This category examines language interventions, curricula, and outcomes and include early elementary students. Direct Instruction curricula include: DISTAR Language and Language for Learning
This category examines spelling interventions, curricula, and outcomes and include elementary students. Direct Instruction curricula include: Spelling Mastery and Spelling Through Morphographs
This category examines interventions, curricula, and outcomes across multiple subject areas (e.g. reading and mathematics) and include elementary students.
This category examines interventions, curricula, and outcomes across multiple subject areas (e.g. reading and mathematics) and include secondary students.
This category examines findings and longitudinal outcomes of Project Follow Through.
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WHAT MATERIALS ARE NEEDED TO IMPLEMENT DI AND THE NIFDI MODEL?
During the first year of implementation, you will need two categories of Direct Instruction materials: programs to use with the majority of your students, and programs to meet specific needs. All materials you use for the first year teach language arts: reading, writing, thinking and speaking.
Programs for the Majority of Students
Programs to Meet Specific Needs
All of the above materials are published by SRA/McGraw-Hill and may be purchased online at www.sraonline.com/directinstruction
Numerous myths about DI circulate in education circles, usually by people who have never taught the program or never seen it used by teachers who have received proper training and support. These myths have to do with the supposed rigidity of DI, its inappropriateness for certain populations, and its restrictions on creativity. These myths are myths.
After you’ve taught the program for a few months, you will see that the program has the flexibility to accommodate the needs of lower and higher-performing students, and it allows teacher creativity within the confines of the script, much as a play script allows an actor to be creative within its confines. Most importantly, you will see that all students succeed in ways you hadn’t thought possible before. The DI programs provide teachers with a powerful tool for presenting an instructional sequence that has been verified to be highly effective with the full range of learners. By providing effective wording and examples, the scripts allow teachers to focus on students’ responses.
Teachers don’t need to worry about how to present critical skills and concepts. Instead, they can concentrate on what students know, what they don’t understand, and where they need additional practice or support. Your interaction with students will increase with DI because the DI programs elicit high rates of student responses in each lesson. With DI, you will have a much better understanding of your students’ skill levels than ever before. DI is effective with all students as long as they are placed and grouped at their skill levels and taught to mastery every day.
Groups should be homogeneous with respect to students’ current performance level, and these groups should be flexible in order to incorporate different rates of student learning. Some students master skills and concepts quickly and may be ready to move to a higher group. Other students need additional practice and might need to be moved to a lower group. These adjustments to student placement are made on a weekly basis through the analysis of student performance data. To the largest extent possible, with the school’s resources, instruction is individualized for students through flexible grouping.
Senior Direct Instruction Author Siegfried Engelmann addresses many of the myths related to DI in a series of videos recorded in 2017. In the video segments, you will hear Zig's thoughts on everything from "Drill and Kill" to multi-sensory learning to teachers' creativity in a DI classroom.
For more, see the work of:
Professor Sara Tarver - University of Wisconsin
pdf
DI and Higher Order Thinking, compiled by Bill Sower
pdf
Myths and Truths About Direct Instruction (Tarver, 1998)
pdf
Research on Direct Instruction: 25 Years Beyond DISTAR, Chapter 3: “Myths about Direct Instruction” (Adams & Engelmann, 1996)
Project Follow Through was the most extensive educational experiment ever conducted. Beginning in 1968 under the sponsorship of the federal government, it was charged with determining the best way of teaching at-risk children from kindergarten through grade 3. Over 200,000 children in 178 communities were included in the study, and 22 different models of instruction were compared. The communities that implemented the different approaches spanned the full range of demographic variables (geographic distribution and community size), ethnic composition (white, black, Hispanic, Native American) and poverty level (economically disadvantaged and economically advantaged). Parent groups in participating communities selected one approach that they wanted to have implemented, and each school district agreed to implement the approach the parent group selected.
Follow Through had strong safeguards to assure that the participating districts actually implemented the approach it adopted. The government provided stipends to supplement local budgets and support the implementations and also provided comprehensive health services, including a nutritional component, plus medical-dental care.
Follow the links below to get additional information on Project Follow Through, including its design, the findings, and what happened with the results:
Athabasca University online module on Direct Instruction Evidence: Project Follow Through.
A pdf special issue of Effective School Practices published in 1995-96 described Project Follow Through and its implications for current generations of students.
Shepard Barbash describes the design and outcomes of Project Follow Through in his book Clear Teaching.
Staff of NIFDI's Department of Research and Evaluation have prepared a comprehensive pdf bibliography of writing related to Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through.
Veteran Direct Instruction author, researcher, and implementer Bonnie Grossen presented this webinar and provided insight into the outcomes of the project and the response to the findings.
Linda Carnine, Susie Andrist, and Jerry Silbert discuss Project Follow Through with Dr. Zach Groshell on The Direct Instruction Podcast.
