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Meta-Analysis Confirms Effectiveness of an Old School Approach: Direct Instruction

Academic Tutoring that Works

This post originally appeared in Flypaper.

Last updated February 8, 2018

Did you hear the one about a curriculum with fifty years of research that actually demonstrates its effectiveness? There’s a new meta-analysis in the peer-reviewed journal the Review of Educational Research that looks at over five hundred articles, dissertations, and research studies and documents a half-century of “strong positive results” for a curriculum regardless of school, setting, grade, student poverty status, race, and ethnicity, and across subjects and grades.

One Response

  1. Dr. Robert Pondiscio,
    I wanted you to know that the article you published about the meta-analysis of Direct Instruction in 2018 and was more recently mentioned in the July 2023 issue of Education Next has had a tremendous impact in Northern Colorado. I have just finished writing a grant request to THE WELD TRUST FOUNDATION a large community-based non-profit in Greeley, CO to serve 8 public school districts in Weld County. We would begin working with the in districts as school begins in the Fall, 2023 through the end of the the 2023-24 school year. We have titled this grant:
    Learning Loss: REDO.
    A career educator, I finished my doctoral degree in Administration, Planning and Social Policy at Harvard in 1991. I am currently running my second private educational business, based upon Direct Instruction, and the results are (OF COURSE!) outstanding. In addition to our private clients we have served since 2015, we have worked in two public Colorado School Districts, Boulder Valley School District and Weld County RE-4, Windsor school district for the past four years. We are seeing a consistently, one to three and one-half years (1-3.5 years) of grade equivalency improvement in 30 hours of instruction in either reading or math! We have served various at-risk populations (including Title One, students on an IEP, students diagnosed with ADD/ADHD and students on 504 Plans. We have had the same results, regardless of these designations!
    Our team, at Ala Carte Learning Solutions, Inc, a public benefit Colorado corporation, and our non-profit organization, Ala Carte Education Foundation, Inc. wish to publicly thank you for bringing continued attention to the positive impact that Direct Instruction continues to bring to struggling students in the post-COVID era.!

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