How To Design An Elementary School Part 1: Competency Based Instruction

What is Competency Based Instruction?

Jul 23, 2023

This post was my first. Few people have read it. So, I thought I’d repost it.

If you reviewed the research in education to discover the essential components of instruction and designed a school around those principles, what would the school look like?

Designing a new elementary school requires careful consideration of various factors, including curriculum choices, teaching methodologies, classroom design, and student motivation strategies. Each aspect is discussed below but in several parts. This is part 1, parts 2 and 3 are forthcoming.

The Essential Components of Instruction.

According to Jack Michael, a professor at Western Michigan University, the essential components of instruction are as follows:

1) assessment;

2) goals and objectives;

3) a program of instruction, aka a curriculum;

4) a mastery criterion to advance from one unit of the curriculum to the next;

5) frequent testing to monitor the students’ repertoire and modify the curriculum if necessary;

6) remediation procedures to correct errors; and

7) payoffs (aka reinforcers) for participating in the educational activity instead of other competing activities.

To the extent that these components are present, the student will learn regardless of the subject matter. Instruction will be less effective if these components are missing.

If you are teaching a child to swim, the assessment, the testing, the mastery criterion, and the reinforcers will all look different compared to teaching a child to read. Yet each example of instruction will have the same essential components.

Competency-Based Education

Competency-Based Education (CBE) or Competency Based Instruction (CBI) is an instructional approach that focuses on students mastering specific skills or competencies at their own pace. In the 1960s and ’70s, Competency-Based Education was known as the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) developed by Fred Keller. Today Competency Based Education is used successfully in elementary schools, high schools, universities, and medical schools.

Keller (on the left with BF Skinner) was a professor at Columbia University. He was invited to become a Visiting Professor at Western Michigan University in the 1970s when I was there as a student. He offered a class on Behavior Analysis in the Psychology Department. It was unlike any course I had ever taken. The course was divided into 15 units. A student went into his classroom anytime between the hours of 8 am and 5 pm and requested a packet of instructional materials from a proctor that included reading materials, and study questions. Once the student read the materials, answered the study questions, and studied them the student took a quiz. Once completed the proctor immediately graded the test. If the student obtained a 100% on the test the student passed and received the next unit packet. If the student obtained a score less than 100% on the quiz the student was required to re-read the materials, re-study the study questions and take another test over the same unit. The student could review questions or misunderstandings with the proctor for remediation. Alternate tests with a different selection of questions were available for each unit. The student studied and retook the quizzes until the unit was mastered. This process continued until all units were mastered. There was no deadline to complete the course. Students went at their own pace. Some students finished the course in less than 15 weeks, other students took more than 15 weeks. If a student stopped before s/he completed all the units, course grades were arranged as follows: students who mastered 90% of the units obtained an A; 80% a B; 70% a C, and so on.

Please note that every student mastered every unit they completed at a 100% level even if they did not master all the units. Since the information in the earlier units was necessary to understand the information provided in later units a 100% mastery criterion was used to prevent cumulative failure - which might occur if Keller permitted a student to move to the next unit after only demonstrating a 70% mastery on a quiz. Twice a week, Keller gave lectures on the material and was available for questions. He had charm. As I remember, most students enjoyed the class and obtained an A.

CBE in Primary Schools.

While CBE has gained popularity, its effectiveness in elementary education is still an area of ongoing research. Here is one example.

According to Cecilia Le, Rebecca Wolfe, and Adria Steinberg (2014), the Chugach School District, located in Alaska turned to a Competency-Based Education model, which they called “Performance Based Learning” to reverse low academic achievement prevalent among the students within the 22,000-acre school district. They served students from Kindergarten through High School. Robert Marzano et. al, reported in 1992-93 the district had an enrollment of 132 students. Ninety percent of the students were below grade level in reading. Fewer than 25% of the students scored proficient or better in language arts and arithmetic. Few students completed high school. The community and school board wondered what could be done to improve the education provided within the district.

According to Marzano et. al., Roger Sampson was hired as superintendent. He and his assistant Richard DeLorenzo initiated the move to CBE. They identified the content all students were expected to master based on what people from the community, parents, and students selected as important. Grade levels were abandoned. Subsequently, each student was required to master knowledge and demonstrate skills in key areas, moving ahead only when the student demonstrated mastery of the subject matter. They moved through the curricula at their own pace, and held to a high mastery criterion for advancement. Teachers developed individual learning plans for each student. Students tracked their own progress.

Within 5 years the average ELA scores on the California Achievement Test rose from the bottom quartile to the 72nd percentile. Teacher turnover rates fell and test scores improved. In 2001 the Chugach School District was awarded the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for performance excellence. The word spread to other school districts. Gradually, CBE was adopted by more than 250 schools and 150,000 students in 30 US school districts.

A review of the literature on CBE from 2000 to 2019 was published by Carla Evans, Erika Landl, and Jeri Thompson in the Journal of Competency-Based Education (2021). Here is what they reported on the effects of CBE on the academic achievement of students in elementary school:

1.) “Students who were academically behind completed math and literacy performance level requirements faster than students in a traditional school system (Brodersen & Randel, 2017)”

2). “Students in schools using competency-based models outperformed demographically similar peers on state tests (Steele et. al., 2014)”

3). “Students in study schools made significantly greater gains on NWEA MAP interim assessments in ELA and Mathematics than students in matched comparison groups and relative to national averages (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2014)”.

4. “Of students who started in the bottom quartile, students from study schools demonstrated greater gains than students in a matched comparison group on NWEA MAP ELA and Math interim assessments after 2 years”.

CBE is difficult to install in a traditional school district. It is not a panacea for a school’s ills but it appears to be a step in the right direction.

Reading Curricula

In setting up our elementary school, we must select a reading curriculum. So, which reading curriculum should we pick? First, let’s eliminate some of the most popular, yet ineffective, reading curricula used by school districts nationwide, namely, those published by the Heinemann publishing company. These include curricula developed by Marie Clay who authored “The Reading Recovery Program and Lucy Calkin who authored “Units of Study” a reading curriculum built on the notion that students are natural readers. “They don’t have to learn to sound out words, there are other ways to figure out what the words say.” Leveled Literacy Intervention by Fountas and Pinnell is another reading program based on the same flawed philosophy. According to a transcript of Emily Hanford’s podcast, Sold a Story, she states: “Millions of kids can’t read well. Scientists have known for decades how children learn to read but many schools are ignoring the research. They buy teacher training and books that are rooted in a disproven idea”. “The leveled readers’ curriculum taught students to guess based on context, pictures, and sentence patterns. Students gave the appearance of reading but they were not”.

Ok, so what reading curricula are effective? One is a Direct Instruction Reading program called, “Reading Mastery” by Siegfried Engelmann, et. al.. There is a home version that parents can buy for about $20, entitled, Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons. It’s designed to teach the child the discriminations needed to read. He provides a script for the teacher to follow. He uses a funny-looking font to help the child discern the difference between b and d; th, t, and other letters. There is a line over vowels with long sounds. There is an arrow under sentences to help the child sound out letters from left to right. Letters in a word that are silent are printed smaller than other letters. Gradually the font used for the words transforms into a font similar to Times New Roman. Other visual prompts are faded out. It teaches the child the sounds of the alphabet first, then the names of the letters of the alphabet. At lesson 100 the child is reading at a second-grade level. The home version is the fast-cycle version. The edition used in schools has 3 times the number of lessons so it can be customized for each student.

According to the parent guide, Direct Instruction Reading was involved in more than a dozen comparative studies. Children taught using Distar (aka Reading Mastery) outperformed other children who received instruction using other reading curricula. The largest study was Project Follow Through. Various school districts across the United States agreed to implement the program in grades K-3. They used Direct Instruction Reading, Arithmetic, and Language programs. Students consistently outperformed all other curricula in Reading, Math, and Language, regardless of race, geographical location, or income level. Despite these results, Direct Instruction has not caught on. Few school districts use the curriculum. When I consulted with San Diego City Schools in the early 2000s Direct Instruction was relegated to students placed in classrooms for the severely handicapped despite the fact that San Diego was once one of the schools that participated in the Follow Through research project. To read the engrossing story behind Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through, may I recommend, “Teaching Needy Kids in our Backward System” by Siegfried Engelmann.

Here are some other phonics-based reading programs:

Jolly Phonics is a comprehensive program that uses a phonics approach. It introduces letter sounds and teaches blending and decoding and encoding. One study by Carol Callinan and Emile van Der Zee indicated that Jolly Phonics was superior to THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills).

The Wilson Reading System is used frequently with students diagnosed with dyslexia. It is a multi-sensory phonics program that focuses on teaching phonemic awareness and phonics skills. According to Wilson’s website, “Material is presented in 12 steps, not corresponding to school grade levels that are further divided into 63 incremental subsets each building upon the previous one. Mastery of each subset is required before progressing to the next one..” The curriculum incorporates Orton-Gillingham's teaching techniques.

Fundations is a research-based program developed by the Wilson Language Training Corporation. It incorporates phonics, spelling, and handwriting instruction. According to the Fundations website studies have shown positive effects on early reading and spelling skills in young children.

Phonics for Reading was developed by Anita Archer. This curriculum emphasizes phonics instruction and uses engaging materials to teach reading skills. Anita Archer discusses the research in her book, Explicit Instruction Effective and efficient teaching.

Sound Partners is a research-based phonics intervention program designed to help struggling readers in Kindergarten through second grade (Vadasy et al., 2005).

Read, Write, Inc. is a phonics program widely used in the UK and incorporates phonics, writing, and reading comprehension skills. The research is discussed at Ruthmiskin.com. https://www.ruthmiskin.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ruth_miskin_literacy_inc_-_read_write_inc_research_and_evidence-1-1.pdf

Phonics Pathways is a straightforward program that teaches phonics in a step-by-step fashion through reading exercises. According to their abstract, April Byrd and David Collum designed a study to “find the impact of phonics and phonemic awareness based program on third grade English-Language Arts MAP test scores. The study used archived test data from thirteen school districts across the state of Missouri for analysis. The data showed that there was a statistically positive impact on student test scores through the use of the Pathways to Reading program”.

Do you have experience with CBE or any of these or other reading curricula? I’d appreciate your comments positive or negative.

END OF PART 1;

Part 2 Coming Soon: Math Curricula

(Is a spiral-organized curriculum best for teaching math?)

Paul’s Substack of Useful Information

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