The Eight-Year Study

When I do my Twitter round-ups, I almost always re-find posts I saved that are too long for the short format but that I still want to point to. Here's one from Alfie Kohn, who's among my favorite thinkers on education and parenting, from about halfway through April:

Time for my periodic reminder about one of the most important educational research findings of the 20th century: the Eight-Year Study. Back in the 1930s, 30 high schools around the U.S. turned traditional practice on its head, especially for college-bound students. In place of grade-driven, teacher-controlled, fact-based instruction, the learning was interdisciplinary, conceptual, experiential, collaborative, often ungraded, and fashioned jointly by teachers and students.

Hundreds of colleges agreed to set aside their usual admissions requirements so that students from these progressive programs wouldn't be penalized. Over several years, more than 1,500 students were then compared to carefully matched students from conventional schools.

The result: experimental students did just as well at college, and often better, on all counts — grades, extracurricular participation, and lower drop-out rates, as well as on measures such as intellectual curiosity and resourcefulness.

And here's the kicker: "The further a school departed from the traditional college preparation program, the better was the record of its graduates."

Many factors can explain why these remarkable findings were largely ignored and why high schools are still so traditional today. But now we know that it's not because students need, or even benefit from, those conventional practices in order to succeed in college.

Kohn provides a link to the the first volume of the 5-volume series, and a three-page summary that was done in 1971.

The study started in 1932 and ended in 1940, so it's pretty obvious why people may have been distracted when it was published in 1942. Fights over rigid curriculum, as we are currently undergoing once again here in Minnesota, remind me how far afield education can wander from what actually matters.