Although it's not an article on DI, a recent feature in the Wall Street Journal titled "Practice Makes Perfect -- And Not Just for Jocks and Musicians" provides some good support of DI program practices, such as:

• You can be creative when you've mastered material: "Rote learning and conceptual thinking often feed synergistically on each other, freeing our brain capacity for those tasks that require the maximum amount of attention and creativity."
  
  
• The importance of the correction procedure: "...fast, simple feedback is almost always more effective at shaping behavior than is a more comprehensive response well after the fact."
  
  
• The value of practicing skills over time and introducing them systematically: "What drives mastery is encoding success - performing an action the right way over and over."
  
  
• Why the small-step design of DI programs is effective: "The brain likes to learn - but it prefers to in manageable leaps."

You can find the article here.

The new 2013 catalog from McGraw-Hill is now available! You can find the PDF at here.

You'll also find an easy-find table of contents that will help you quickly find Direct Instruction programs in the new catalog by clicking here.

On Friday, Tony Abbott visited the Aurukun campus of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy in western Cape York to see the impressive results the school is achieving through Direct Instruction (DI) with support from the National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI). Mr. Abbott was at the school, along with a group of senior business leaders, volunteering for a “working bee” – a sweat equity project that targeted improving the school library. But, this wasn’t the only appeal to visiting Aurukun. Abbott had the chance to see what he describes as a “transformed school” from his visit just three years earlier where DI has delivered “staggering results”.

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NIFDI's Office of Research and Evaluation has issued a review of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) report on Reading Mastery (RM) and Learning Disabled students. As you will see in the review, the office has concluded that there was serious misrepresentation of the articles included in the study. One actually showed that students studying with RM had significantly greater gains than students in national and state norming populations. Because the gains were equal to students in Horizons (another DI program), the WWC concluded that RM had no effect. The other study involved giving an extra 45 minutes of phonics related instruction to students studying RM. The WWC interpreted the better results of the students with the extra time as indicating potentially negative effects of RM.

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