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Project Discovery
Purpose
Only 22 percent of students in New York City high schools complete the academic program and earn the so-called Regents Diploma, which is necessary for admission to college without remediation. Most of the students who earn a Regents Diploma are honors students. The average students who begin high school in the academic track, on the other hand, tend to drift off into non- Regents courses, and do not receive the advice or support that would help them to persist in a program more useful to their futures.
In this project, College of Staten Island faculty worked with two high schools, one in Staten Island and one in Brooklyn, both with even smaller percentages of students earning the Regents Diploma than is average for the City. They helped high school teachers to design and implement a program that would better hold the interest of average students and reduce the rate of attrition, absenteeism, and uncompleted assignments in high school, and the need for remediation should they get to college.
Innovative Features
Project Discovery used two strategies to overcome the alienation and boredom characteristic of the target population of students. First, teachers attempted to get students actively involved in their own learning, designing discovery-oriented laboratories and exercises in which students learn for themselves rather than simply listening to lectures and memorizing. Second, they created an integrated curriculum in which a team of English, social studies, science and mathematics teachers, working with a co mmon group of students, coordinated the work being done in their separate classes. Students were purposely recruited from the average (neither honors nor remedial) group and randomly assigned to the classes. While these strategies have been successfully implemented elsewhere, their use with this population is unusual.
Prior to FIPSE funding, a pilot of the program had been run with a group of freshmen in the Staten Island high school. The grant allowed a second group to have this experience as freshmen and to continue it into the sophomore and junior years. The Brooklyn school began the program under the grant.
Evaluation
An independent evaluator interviewed teachers and administrators, systematically explored student gains in writing and critical thinking skills, and compared Discovery participants and non-participants on course registration, passing rates, scores on Regents Examinations, and attendance rates.
Project Impact
At the Staten Island high school, Discovery students performed significantly better than the non-participating controls on almost all counts. Attendance rates during the three years of the project were around 95 percent, from five to fifteen percent higher than the control group.
The critical thinking skills of ninth grade Discovery students improved by about one standard deviation, but these same students showed less gain after the tenth grade. In the ninth grade, participants performed better on the Regents biology exam and had a higher passing rate than a comparable group. They also scored better on the Sequential Mathematics test.
Tenth graders who had participated for two years were significantly more likely to pass Regents exams in chemistry, math and global studies than their non-participating peers. In the eleventh grade they passed physics, math and U.S. history and government tests at higher rates. In math and physics, they were far more often enrolled in the Discovery courses than non- participants. Participants' grade point averages were significantly higher than non-participants' in both ninth and tenth grades. The program did not, however, have any significant effect on the writing performance of students, nor did their test scores and passing rates equal those of honors students.
Students were not the only ones to feel the impact of the project. Discovery teachers developed a greater sense of intellectual collegiality, experienced more control over the curriculum, improved their skills in helping students to discover ideas, and learned to teach without trying to control the outcome. Enthusiasm for the program in the Staten Island high school is such that the entire school is adopting the Discovery program.
At the Brooklyn school, on the other hand, almost no differences in attendance or performance were observed in Discovery students. In the first year, this was probably because remedial students were assigned to the Discovery program. Even with a fresh start in the second year, however, Discovery Program students performed no better than the control group.
The project directors and the evaluator attributed this difference in results between the two schools to a much greater sense of program ownership by teachers in the Staten Island school, despite equal enthusiasm on the part of both groups of instructors. Administrative interest and cooperation seem to have been greater in the Staten Island program, which also had a longer duration than the one at the Brooklyn school.
Lessons Learned
The project directors and the evaluator emphasize the need for teacher ownership of the program. At the beginning of their work together, the Staten Island teachers relied heavily on the college faculty for ideas. When the teachers began to take charge intellectually, the energy of the program increased markedly. This transformation never occurred at the Brooklyn school.
The project clearly demonstrates the possibility of improving student performance using discovery strategies and relating academic topics to each other and to problems that are tangible to students. Field trips, such as one to Ellis Island that began a unit on immigration, illustrate this principle.
College and school faculty learned that there is no ideal theme or structure for curriculum integration. The important aspect of integration for teachers is the exciting intellectual process of working out themes and patterns. This process, however, can only take place in a school whose administrators support it.
Project Continuation
The Discovery program design has been adopted for the entire Staten Island high school, with support from the Board of Education. The project directors and participating teachers have had numerous opportunities to present their work to teachers and administrators in the New York City school system and have aroused interest in many quarters.
In addition, a second FIPSE grant now in its final year (Project Discovery II) has allowed for the further testing of this project in the Staten Island school, this time not with average students but with those entering high school below grade level. Although the final evaluation has not been completed, to date the same procedures applied with these students have not produced similarly successful results, and the project has met with a series of obstacles. These include such practices as assigning the least able teachers to underachieving students; scheduling these students for their most important classes in the worst times of the day and shifting them from one class to another as need arises, destroying the block programming which is essential to the Project Discovery approach. Lastly, school troublemakers inevitably filter downward into these classes, from which they cannot be expelled because there is nowhere else to put them. Despite these obstacles, however, some success in raising achievement levels has resulted.
Because of their experience in the FIPSE projects, the College has awarded the co-project directors additional released time and has contributed to further development of a Discovery Center to initiate and disseminate similar projects. The College has also hired four of the Project Discovery high school teachers as adjuncts to disseminate the Discovery idea.
Available Information
A publication describing the project and the process for implementing it is in preparation. Information is available from:
Leonard A. Ciaccio
James W. Sanders
The College of Staten Island
Discovery Center
2800 Victory Blvd., Room 1A-401
Staten Island, NY 10314
718-982-2325
[CUNY - The City College] [Table of Contents] [IV. Rewarding Effective Teaching]
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