Thread by @greg_ashman

The largest education experiment ever run is one that most teachers and even many education professors do not know about.

Why? It is an intriguing story 🧵

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that the U.S. government funded Head Start program for pre-school children was going to be expanded into the early grades.

Unfortunately, Congress chose to vote him only a fraction of the money needed.

Rather than despair, the government decided to use the money to run a research project.

Instead of a universal program, different providers would run their own programs at a sample of sites. This was a 'horse-race' designed to see which programs were the most effective.

Project Follow Through was born.

The types of programs that were run were categorised as affective models, cognitive models, or basic skills models.

One of the 'basic skills' models was a form of direct instruction developed by Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann and colleagues.

Direct Instruction (capitalised D and I, often called 'Big DI') or DISTAR was a set of explicit teaching materials.

New ideas were broken down and rigorously taught and practiced according to a 'theory of instruction' Engelmann and colleagues developed.

It was so explicit, teachers followed a script. Engelmann did not set out with the intention of scripting the lessons but found that without an excessive amount of training, teachers deviated from the principles.

Educationalists hated the program.

Nevertheless, Direct Instruction won the horse-race and won it big. It wiped the floor with the other programs, even in areas those programs targeted.

Some think that because Direct Instruction was labelled 'basic skills' it only improved these skills, but it was *also* the best program for cognitive skills like reading comprehension and problem solving, and for affective outcomes like self-esteem.

Educationalists complained. The variation between different centres running Direct Instruction was often greater than the variation between programs in the same centre.

This is to be expected. Context matters. That's why it was designed as such a large experiment.

Some absurdly claimed that exposure to Direct Instruction caused later delinquency, but the claim was based on highly selective and disputed data.

However, the most successful tactic was to simply ignore Project Follow Through and it findings. Educationalists vowed to never mention it again and so the largest experiment in education history was largely forgotten.

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