At 08:51 PM 2/4/05 +0000, Ken Moore wrote: >When I first heard of it, it was supposed to have a beneficial effect on >teen-age behaviour. I would have thought that would have been easy to >measure in its early days.
Nothing in education is easy to measure. Sometimes just the existence of a program (whatever its value) makes an improvement because it brings the attention of parents, teachers and administrators to the students in ways that weren't present before the program. And with the disparity in teacher training and the individual nature of teaching itself, control groups are extremely hard to create, making the studies end up being very longitudinal if their evaluating 'generic' programs like Head Start. Was it the attention? The stimulation? The change of environment? The food? Even if they are good scientific studies, you can bet they'll be buried in political excrement of one kind or another. One day I'll tell the story of my own six-year teaching program, where the school board spent four years trying to fire me, and at the end of my tenure (I'd promised to teach only six years), I won both national and regional commendations -- both of which they forgot to tell me about. Politics is rough stuff. >1) I am currently listening to a broadcast of a concert by the BBC >Symphony Orchestra. Gawd I hate you. :) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
