Hope Academy, a private boarding school for abused girls in rural Kenya, began using Corrective Reading (Comprehension and Decoding) and Spelling Mastery in place of the Kenyan English curriculum in 2012. The students, girls in grades three through six whose third language is English, immediately began outpacing national performance on the standardized Kenyan national assessment in Reading.

When comparing student standardized test scores, the Kenyan government posts the country's results with how many pupils are above the mean. At the end of the academic year (November), all Kenyan private and public schools take the standardized achievement test. Scores are released to the public to determine the best private and public schools. Both the students and schools are ranked, and students scoring over 250 marks out of 500 can continue on with their education into secondary or high school.

In 2012, only 51.35% of the eighth grade student population in Kenya, taking the final standardized test, passed the 50% mark required. In the following two years, scores continued to decline nationally with 50.29% of students achieving the250 cut score in 2014 and 49.71% in 2014. (See Figure 1).

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Psychology Today recently featured a blog post titled Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm that contends that academic preschools and kindergartens are stressful and unhappy places, have no lasting effect on students’ later academic success and can even promote long-term harm to children’s social and psychological development. In a report released by the National Institute for Direct Instruction, these serious misrepresentations made in the post are documented.

Drill, endless worksheets, unhappiness, and a lack of play are the antithesis of well-run Direct Instruction school. Substantial research evidence indicates that having well-structured early academic instruction in the DI tradition can provide the basis for continued success, not just in the early grades but through the high school years. Academic early education can provide an important and cost-efficient means of for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to compete on the same level as those from more adhovantaged settings.

Download the full report here: Harmful Effects of Academic Early Education? A Look at the Claims and the Evidence (Psychology Today, Jun 2015)

NIFDI's Office of Research and Evaluation has released a new technical report studying the impact of Direct Instruction on college preparation readiness.

This report examines the high school accomplishments and preparation for college of students with varying degrees of exposure to Direct Instruction in elementary school. Results indicate that students taught with Direct Instruction early in their school career were significantly more likely to be prepared to enter higher education – enrolling in a traditional academic program, finishing a college prep mathematics class, and  taking Advanced Placement courses and/or college entrance examinations. Among those enrolled in traditional academic programs, those with early exposure to Direct Instruction also ranked higher in their high school graduating class and were more likely to have a GPA high enough to qualify for college admission.

Read the full report here.

Students in Roseville, Michigan are demonstrating significant growth in reading and math competencies after Roseville Community Schools introduced Direct Instruction at district elementary schools in the fall of 2012. The implementation began with Corrective Reading as an intensive intervention for low performing students in 4th and 5th grade while Reading Mastery was concurrently introduced as a core program for students in kindergarten through grade 2. The next year, the district added grades 3 and 4 to the implementation, and by 2015, all seven elementary schools in the district were implementing Direct Instruction in kindergarten through grade 5. The efforts are paying off. In 2012, only half of Kment Elementary's 3rd graders were passing the state exam. Just a year later, nearly 60% were passing. The performance of the cohorts is also improving. The group of 3rd graders who had a 50% pass rate in 2012-13 had nearly 70% of the group passing the following year.

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