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 their middle-income peers.

Direct Instruction

Of all the Follow Through instructional models that were examined, the one approach that has endured, more or less intact, for more than 35 years is the direct instruction model developed by Engelmann and Becker and their colleagues, such as Jean Osborn and Doug Carnine. The direct instruction model was adapted from pioneering work done by Bereiter and Engelmann in early childhood preschool education in 1966. The direct instruction curricula developed for the Project Follow Through longitudinal study became the precursors of the Science Research Associates (SRA) Reading Mastery and Language for Learning series, which still is used widely.

The overarching and deceptively simple principle of the direct instruction model was to ensure that all students learn, including those with limited exposure to print and formal academic English, by not only having a well-designed curriculum but also presenting the curriculum in a clear and unambiguous manner. Explicitness is thus a cornerstone of direct instruction. A central aim of direct instruction is to ensure high levels of student success, which in turn will lead to increased self-confidence and a willingness to take risks and grapple with conceptual thinking.