Project Follow Through and Direct Instruction

Project Follow Through

Project Follow Through, at the time of its inception in the 1960s, was the largest educational research study ever conducted. The U. S. Office of Education (now the U.S. Department of Education) decided to support implementation of innovative approaches for teaching low-income students and oversee a comparative longitudinal evaluation of the effectiveness of eight of the major models. The instructional models were sponsored by a university or educational laboratory and ran the full gamut of theoretical approaches, from behaviorism to psychoanalysis to discovery learning and constructivist approaches derived from theories of Jean Piaget to direct instruction. The research was considered a test of which approaches were actually effective in helping students born in low-income households achieve at levels that approached ...