Aims that are meetable and beatable.

[snip]

"Our first class-wide frequency recording was in a Montessori class for special education children...Elaine Fink showed we could effectively use rate of response with curricula as varied and as difficult to measure as Montessori materials. Clay and Ann Starlin showed an entire first grade class could correct and chart their own academic work on standard celeration charts...Ron Holzschuh with Dorothy Dobbs and Tom Caldwell showed that academic frequencies (rates) recorded 40 times more effects of curricular changes than did percent correct...These and many other studies proved behavior frequencies significantly more sensitive to learning variables in the classrooms than percent correct and percent of time on task." (Lindsley, 1990a, p. 7).

Van Ostrom stressed that aims should be meetable and beatable. This suggests that our long-term goals and aims might require mini-aims for some learners as they strive for high fluencies.

His research was showing "frequency to be 10 to 100 times more sensitive than percentage correct in recording the effects of drugs and different reinforcers" (Lindsley, 1990b, p. 10). He was painfully aware that when researchers applied their methods, even behavioral methods, to academic behaviors of school children, they typically recorded only percentage correct, "the time-honored educational measure."

writing objectives

Some of us were talking about writing objectives on IEPs the other day. This page may be useful —

Precision Teaching: A Brief History

It's Direct Instruction.

Yes.

I'm in favor of Direct Instruction.

My neighbor the statistician just sent me this link to a site on precision teaching.

I thought it sounded familiar, then discovered I'd posted an abstract awhile back.....

I like the words "precision" and "teaching" so much I could almost go for this just because of what it's called, sight unseen.



Which reminds me, does anyone know what went wrong with "outcomes-based learning"? (I think that was the term.)

Naturally I keep thinking we ought to be looking at the outcomes of curriculum and pedagogy; then I find out there already was an outcomes-based movement of some kind (while you were sleeping) and it was a fiasco.

What was it?

Why was it a fiasco?

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Dec 2006

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