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<< >> Title Contents Grubb, W. N., Kalman, J., Castellano, M., Brown, C., & Bradby, D. (1991). Readin', writin' and 'rithmetic one more time: The role of remediation in vocational education and job training (MDS-309). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

THE NATURE OF EFFECTIVE PROGRAMS: THE CONVENTIONS AND THE STRUCTURE OF SKILLS AND DRILLS

In the absence of firm evidence about which remedial programs are effective, it is necessary to search for other ways of judging existing programs. Fortunately, there is extensive literature about "good practice" in adult and remedial education, drawing on the experience of teachers and administrators, on the fragments of research available, and often on simple common sense. These conventions provide some standards against which to measure practices in remedial education. We can then examine more carefully the dominant approach in remediation we label skills and drills to see whether it conforms to good practice in adult education. The comparison clarifies how different the assumptions of skills and drills are from the ideals of good practice.

The Conventions of Good Practice in Adult Education

The literature describing good practice in adult education, often incorporated in manuals providing advice on "how to do it" to administrators and teachers, is far from uniform since it covers practices at levels from the most elementary (in volunteer and ABE programs) to college-based developmental programs. Not surprisingly, debates rage about the best methods of instruction, some of which we review in this section. Still, a number of prescriptions come up repeatedly in this writing. The most common recommendations in remedial education include the following:[39]

Most of these conventions seem self-evident; it shouldn't require extensive experience, a review of the literature, or complex evaluations to conclude that programs for adults should recognize the interests and goals of adults. What is surprising, however, is how regularly these conventions are violated by the dominant practices within remedial programs, particularly by the assumptions and the practices of skills and drills.

The Assumptions of Skills and Drills [40]

The skills and drills approach to learning is widespread in remedial programs, even in those which have self-consciously tried to take other approaches; it is also the dominant method of the K-12 schooling system (Cuban, 1984). In addition, it appears in unfamiliar forms; for example, some of the practices which follow functional context literacy training are variants of skills and drills. This dominant approach has certain obvious advantages from the perspective of remedial programs, and it forms an internally consistent approach to instruction. There are, then, many reasons for its dominance, as we will argue more carefully below.

The basic assumption underlying skills and drills is that complex capacities--which include, reading, writing, and mathematics--can be broken into discrete skills which can be ordered in a rigid hierarchy from simple to difficult.[41] Then students perform drills which teach them each discrete skill, moving to the next most complex skill only when the previous one has been mastered. The sequences of skills are familiar to anyone who has gone through the American school system. In reading, students progress from recognizing letters and their sounds, to sounding out (or decoding) words, to decoding simple sentences, to reading first sentences and then paragraphs for their literal meanings, to reading short passages for the main point or for simple inferences. In writing, students progress from sentence completion exercises, to simple sentence constructions, to three-sentence paragraphs with an introduction and a conclusion, to structured forms such as the three-paragraph and the five-paragraph essay. All emphasize correct forms of writing (i.e., spelling, punctuation, and grammar) and provide many opportunities for drills. In math, students work through whole numbers, simple addition and subtraction, then addition and subtraction with carrying and borrowing, multiplication and the glories of multiplication tables, division and the agonies of long division, to fractions, percents, and conversions among measuring systems; "problem solving" takes the form of word problems, again using simple arithmetic operations. Each step in these sequences is broken into many smaller skills, of course; the typical activities include fill-in-the-blank exercises, spelling lists, grammatical errors identification, reading exercises for specific information and main points, and endless arithmetic examples. The purpose of drills is to generate facility and automaticity--the ability to perform a skill easily and without much thought.

Teaching via skills and drills can take several forms. In the K-12 system, a classroom format is the most common; then everyone in the classroom--or, at the very least, groups of children within an internally tracked classroom--follow the same sequence. Classrooms using skills and drills are used in adult remediation, too; but working individually on workbooks and programmed texts is more common than in the K-12 system. Such individual approaches often take place in labs--reading, writing, and math labs--with many students in a space working independently and with one or more teachers circulating to help students or working with them one-on-one.

A third form of skills and drills includes a wide variety of computer programs. Instructors who run computer-based programs cite many advantages: Computers are non-judgmental and endlessly patient, unlike some teachers; they eliminate the possibility of embarrassment in front of peers; they never tire, so students can work on computers at odd hours rather than having to conform to a teacher's or a class's schedule (a special advantage for adult students who have busy lives and irregular hours); and--in a world increasingly filled with computers--they have the ancillary benefit of familiarizing students with computers. Many instructors also speak of computer-based programs as if they constitute a different teaching method and allow students who don't do well with print materials to learn in another way. However, the vast majority of computer-based programs used in remedial programs are simple skills and drills exercises conveyed to a computer screen--they incorporate the same fill-in-the-blank exercises, word recognition, vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, reading comprehension, and arithmetic examples and word problems.[42] When compared to classroom-based skills and drills, the most important differences of computer-based approaches are that the reading passages are shorter (since a typical screen can only hold a few sentences) and that there is no possibility for elaboration of the kind a teacher can provide--diagnosis of a pattern in a student's errors, alternative explanations of a tricky point, supplementary materials, or discussions (classwide or between teacher and student) about an issue. In addition, computer-based programs are often especially rigid about the student's progress through a sequence of material: Some programs will "lock out" students from any unit except the one they are supposed to be working on and will prevent students from shifting to other units until they pass a mastery or exit test.

Proponents of skills and drills claim that individual work with workbooks and computer-based programs lets students work at their own pace and allows programs to be individualized. "Individualization" means something quite specific: An initial test identifies the student's achievement level within the hierarchy of skills--something which is unambiguous because for every subject there is only one hierarchy of skills, ranked from easiest to hardest--and then the student begins working at the level which he or she has not mastered. An individual progresses to the next skill only when he or she has mastered the previous skill, however long mastery takes. There are several advantages to this structuring of the curriculum: It lends itself to open-entry/open-exit programs; students can progress through a skill sequence at their own pace; and students start from "where they are" and have the chance to be rewarded for success since the earliest lessons are relatively easy. However, individualization does not mean that remedial programs are modified to fit the interests of individual students, or that the materials are drawn from the other academic courses or vocational training they are in,[43] or that the method of teaching is changed to fit the learning style of individuals.

Individualization is often associated with student-directed learning and student responsibility. For example, Taggart (1986b) states that in the Comprehensive Competencies Program (CCP) "learners are given responsibility, choice, and a substantial amount of control" (p. 6). However, in most skills and drills programs, students are given remarkably little choice, and what choice they have is constrained by the available lessons and activities. A student can choose to work on reading rather than math, for example, but the rigid sequence of skills through which a student must progress eliminates any substantial choice. Except in those cases in which teachers have moved to a more eclectic approach, there is almost no opportunity for students to choose their own reading materials or math exercises since these are determined by the curriculum.

The approach of skills and drills contains a number of crucial assumptions about teachers, students, and their relationships. The teacher's main responsibility is to manage the implementation of the curriculum, particularly in individualized rather than classroom-based curricula. He or she administers tests, assigns work to students, keeps track of what they have covered, assigns new work when one skill has been completed, and keeps records. Because the curriculum is embodied in textbooks, workbooks, or computer programs, teachers have no responsibility for developing curricula, determining the basic approach to the subject, or assessing how students should work. The only teaching that usually goes on is one-on-one instruction when a student needs clarification--an approach that fits neatly with the individual orientation and confines the teacher to responding to problems that arise in the curriculum itself rather than to questions that may originate outside the curriculum.

The extreme case of teachers acting as managers occurs in some computer-based programs, where those in charge sometimes describe themselves as "computer lab managers" rather than teachers. The most sophisticated computer programs provide management systems that keep track of assignment and reporting requirements, and the manager has little interaction with students aside from remedying problems with the computer system and occasional clarification. The blessing of these management systems has been clarified by Taggart (1986a):

Freed from lesson planning, and with automation of time-consuming activities such as test preparation and checking, record keeping and reporting, teachers can concentrate on one-on-one instruction whenever learners encounter problems in their individual work. (p. 5)

However, in the computer labs we observed, instruction was minimal, and most interactions between teachers and students involved problems with hardware and other procedural issues. Rather than ways of increasing time for active teaching, computer-based methods seem more often to be used to "idiot proof" remedial programs and eliminate virtually all active teaching. Indeed, the preference of non-educational programs--like JTPA--for computer-based programs stems in part from the recognition that their employees are not educators; computer-based programs can be purchased "off the shelf" from vendors without having to think about any of the issues of assessment, curriculum development, and pedagogy.

In these individualized programs, interactions among students are very limited. Students learn from the curriculum materials and secondarily from the teacher--not from each other. Learning is an individual activity, then, not a social activity. A logistical problem in many remedial programs reinforces this pedagogical assumption: When programs are open-entry/open-exit and when they are individualized in the sense that students work independently, the fact that students come at different times and work on different materials further impedes any connections among them.

Skills and drills also embodies several assumptions about students themselves. The most powerful is that students are defined in terms of what they are unable to do--their deficiencies. The first stage in almost all remedial programs is an initial assessment, which is set up to determine where students are in a hierarchy of skills so that they can be assigned to the right exercise. Since these assessments (conventional multiple-choice tests) evaluate individuals along one dimension and produce a single score by which all individuals are rated, it is impossible to use them to discover other strengths, as programs that reject skills and drills often do. One discussion of JTPA efforts described the underlying motivation for assessment with the question, "What is the best approach for assessing basic academic skill deficiencies among JTPA youth?" (Morris, Strumpf, & Curnan, 1988, p. 1, emphasis theirs). Similarly, some writing about functional context training have noted its success in training "low aptitude personnel" in the military--those "considered to be 'below average' in trainability"--as a rationale for its application to "lower aptitude, less literate young people" in the civilian sector (Sticht, 1990). Furthermore, students in remedial programs are invariably of lower-socioeconomic status, with minorities overrepresented; they are invariably described as "disadvantaged," both economically and educationally.

To be sure, many of the teachers and administrators we interviewed took great pains to say that their students are not dumb, that they can learn, and that they are in remediation because the schools are poor rather than because of their lack of any innate ability. The problem is not simply that remedial programs assume incompetence; after all, by construction, students in remedial programs lack certain proficiencies that they or others feel they need. Rather, the problem is that the structure of skills and drills approaches allows no way to counter or modify the assumption of deficiencies. The assessment procedures, the need to take several remedial courses, and the passive nature of learning in which students have almost no choices and in which they are recipients of other's knowledge--all these elements convey the sense that students are ignorant. While it is hard to know how students experience remedial programs, a common theme among those observing ABE programs is that many adult students dislike going back to school settings and school-like activities where they have always been made to feel dumb.

By and large, the curriculum materials in skills and drills approaches are generated specifically for teaching purposes. That is, arithmetic problems are made up rather than coming from occupational tasks or the routine chores of life; reading passages are chosen or generated because of their level of difficulty, not because students choose them or because they have any intrinsic meaning; and writing assignments are similarly disconnected from the other educational or work experiences of students. That is, the materials are decontextualized: They are independent of any aspects of students' lives. To be sure, there is some effort in materials designed for adults to use reading passages about adults rather than passages about children typical in the K-12 system; however, both in form and content, many commercial materials are similar to those in elementary classrooms (Kazemek, 1988). Otherwise, there is little evidence that materials are tailored to the issues that adults in remedial programs wrestle with.

Indeed, the independence of texts and problems from any intrinsically meaningful context reflects an assumption within the conventional approach: The texts used for reading (and the problems used for math) have an intrinsic and unambiguous meaning, and the job of the student is to discover that meaning (or the right answer to math problems). Even when students are working on higher-order skills--inference, for example, or identifying the tone or the point of view of a passage--there is invariably one right answer; and the reading passages in most remedial programs are so short and simple and so intentionally constructed to be devoid of ambiguity that there can be little room for individual interpretation. Similarly, in writing instruction within the skills and drills approach, the purpose is to create texts like those used in reading: simple, declarative, unambiguous, with a great emphasis on proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation, a text intended to have the same meaning in every context.

Two final characteristics are crucial. One is that skills and drills approaches assume motivation on the part of the student. The drills themselves are not meaningful or particularly interesting, nor are they intended to be; they are purely instrumental to achieving a goal--learning to read at a certain level, learning how to do long division, passing the GED, or gaining entry to a vocational training program, for example--which is thought to be powerful enough to motivate the student. Even so, if a student wavers in his or her commitment to that final goal or fails to see the connection between remedial drills and that goal, nothing in the skills and drills approach will supply motivation. This appears to be a serious problem in many remedial programs, since many administrators in our sample of communities reported that students drop out when they fail to see the relevance of basic skills instruction to the employment they seek--a problem exacerbated when remediation is dissociated from the job skills training that (presumably) follows.

Finally, the skills and drills approach assumes that the student can reassemble individual skills into complex competencies and can apply these discrete skills in specific applications. After mastering a series of skills, the student is assumed to be able to read at some level, or write, or perform certain kinds of mathematics--competencies which typically engage the specific skills he or she has mastered. But there is nothing in basic skills instruction to help the student with assemblage and application, since what the student has mastered is a series of smaller skills. Therefore, it is possible for students to learn to decode paragraphs and extract the main point--a favorite exercise in skills and drills approaches--and yet to be unable to understand why reading for information or instruction is appropriate in a particular setting, so they won't read what they are theoretically capable of reading. It is possible for students to be able to carry out arithmetic operations and yet fail to understand which operation is appropriate in a particular case; and students may be able to write--in the sense of linking correctly spelled words together in a grammatical construction--and yet have no idea what information and tone to convey in an actual piece of writing. Particularly when tasks become ambiguous, value-laden, or complicated by interpersonal relationships, the deliberately simplified, depersonalized, and decontextualized exercises of the skills and drills approach may prove useless, unless the student can supply the necessary ability to apply them.

There is, of course, widespread support for skills and drills. It is a logical and internally consistent approach to instruction; it progresses in simple steps, starting from "where the student is," and it allows students to experience success; it also adheres to the tenets of individualized instruction, mastery learning, and competency-based instruction that have become so popular. Most individuals in our society have been taught in this way, since the approach dominates elementary and secondary schools; within the schools, it has been developed and refined over almost two centuries. In a system with limited resources and tight budgets, skills and drills seems efficient because it moves students along a continuum toward a clear goal--rather than allowing them to explore interests of their own that may lead in unforeseen directions. The need in many remedial programs to prepare students for standardized tests--especially the GED in adult education, but other tests such as the TABE and ABLE that are used to admit individuals into job training programs or college-level courses--also reinforces skills and drills, since standardized tests generally measure performance on fragmented and decontextualized skills. The tendency in our society to generate great long lists of competencies required and skills to be mastered--true of mastery-based and competency-based approaches--leads quite naturally to skills and drills.

While there are many reasons for the dominance of skills and drills, its effectiveness is quite a different issue. There is, unfortunately, little direct evidence about the effectiveness of skills and drills relative to the alternatives,[44] so it is necessary to turn to indirect evidence. Most obviously, skills and drills violates many maxims of effective practice in adult education. It ignores the common assertion that curriculum materials should be adult-centered and involve tasks meaningful to adults. The decontextualization of the texts and of the problems in most remedial courses and the use of materials that are embedded in textbooks and computer software used for many different adults--in wildly varied circumstances with varied purposes--undermine any effort to make these materials meaningful. Secondly, skills and drills approaches assume what adults need, rather than investigating what they need: They assume that adults need to pass the GED, or to attain certain scores on the TABE or other assessment, or to progress two grade levels in their reading; they assume that the adults who come to them most need work on various skills, rather than needing other kinds of instruction. In some cases, these assumptions may be valid, or individuals may be so committed to those goals which can be attained in a remedial program that they are motivated to complete it. But there is no mechanism within a skills and drills program for asking whether this is the case; thus, the program violates the common assumption within adult education that programs should serve the needs of adults.

Another common assumption espoused by most adult educators--that teachers should have certain affective characteristics such as sensitivity and understanding--is not violated by skills and drills as much as it is made irrelevant. To the extent that the teacher becomes a manager of curriculum materials, there is no room for the sensitive teaching--teaching that seeks to understand the specific origins of student errors, the variation in the way students learn, the differences in what they seek to accomplish, and the use of several approaches to teaching in addition to didactic methods--that would require certain personal characteristics. In the extreme case, in which instructors are converted into lab managers, there is little purpose to having an individual with warmth and rapport. Of course, teachers can use skills and drills materials in various ways, as in the eclectic approaches we describe below, and, in these cases, teacher characteristics become important again. But the approach itself, with the tendency to elevate curriculum materials over the teacher and to deprofessionalize the teacher, makes these characteristics irrelevant.

Finally, skills and drills ignores the recommendation that adult programs should be flexible and varied in their approaches to learning. Except where teachers bring in supplementary materials and devise their own class-based exercises, a skills and drills program allows only one form of instruction. The extreme forms of skills and drills--the computer-based programs that allow no deviation from the prescribed set of exercises--provide little opportunity for teachers to intervene, and that chance is further diminished when computer-based programs are led by a person who thinks of himself or herself as a lab manager.

A very different challenge to the effectiveness of skills and drills for adult remedial programs is also the simplest and the most powerful. By construction, most individuals enrolled in these programs have not learned basic reading and math despite eight to twelve years of instruction in skills and drills in their elementary and secondary schooling. Why another try with the same approach--particularly in the very short programs typical in JTPA and welfare programs--should succeed when it has previously failed is unclear. One possibility, of course, is that the motivation of wanting a job is more powerful to adults than to younger students, and, therefore, skills and drills programs attached to job training will succeed where the schools have failed. However, this motivation clearly lacks the power to keep many students enrolled in remedial courses, and the separation of basic skills from job skills training in almost all remedial programs further weakens this motivation.

There is, however, one group in remedial courses for whom skills and drills might be effective. Some adults in remedial programs need a kind of refresher course: They have learned basic skills in their earlier schooling, but have been away from school-like activities for so long that they score poorly on standardized tests. For these individuals, a skills and drills approach may be a quick and straightforward way to prepare them for the GED or other tests. Indeed, administrators sometimes cite examples of students who have prepared for the GED in very short periods of time--three to four weeks--and often refer to such individuals as "brush-up" students. But they appear to be in the minority. For the vast numbers of students in remediation who have never mastered certain competencies, the notion of trying skills and drills one more time, in a limited period of time, and with the other distractions and responsibilities of adult life, seems ludicrous.

In the next section we examine some of the alternatives to skills and drills to show that alternatives for adult education exist that are quite different from and potentially much more effective than conventional practice. Our main point is not to provide a listing of alternative programs of proven effectiveness, since that is clearly impossible. Instead, we want to clarify how the alternatives differ from skills and drills, as a way of opening up for public discussion the variation in pedagogical methods.

[39] In this brief section we draw upon more extensive reviews of the ABE literature by Balmuth (1985); Solarzano, Stecher, and Perez (1989); Kazemek (1988); Fueyo (1988); Fingeret and Jurmo (1989); Salvatori and Hull (1990); and Sticht (1988). On recommendations for good practice at the college level, we draw on reviews by Trillin (1980) and Maxwell (1979), and on older reviews by Cross (1976) and Roueche and Snow (1977).

[40] Our description of skills and drills is a distillation of the programs we visited and the curricular materials and computer programs we have examined. What we describe as skills and drills is similar to the descriptions of ABE programs in Fueyo (1988) and Kazemek (1988), the teacher-centered instruction described by Cuban (1984) and Knowles (1980), the "bottom up" approach described by advocates of whole language like Goodman (1986), the "skills development" methods described by Tomlinson (1989), the "conventional wisdom" in elementary classrooms described by Knapp and Turnbull (1990), and the conception of "passive learning" (as distinct from "active learning") mentioned in many contexts. The developmentally appropriate programs favored by early childhood educators (e.g., Bredekamp, 1987) over conventional "school-like" approaches also contain an implicit description and critique of skills and drills in elementary classrooms. However, we have not found an explicit analysis of the assumptions underlying skills and drills.

[41] What skills are "easy" and "difficult" are determined from the viewpoint of curriculum development, rather than from the perception of the learner or an understanding of learning. For evidence that students often do not perceive skills in the same order of difficulty as standard curricula, see Bruner (1990).

[42] Many of our comments about computer-based programs in remedial programs are similar to those of Weisberg (1988), who recommended that local programs develop their own software rather than using any of that now on the market. We note that many computer-based instruction programs exist--such as "intelligent tutoring systems"--that are not based on skills and drills, but we did not see them used in the programs we examined. In their meta-analysis of computer-based adult education programs, Kulik, Kulik, and Shwalb (1986) found that eighteen of the twenty-three studies they included involved "computer-assisted instruction" providing drill and practice (i.e., skills and drills); only three were "computer-managed instruction," and two were "computer-enriched instruction" (pp. 239-240). While they found an overall positive effect size of .42, indicating the superiority of computer-based methods over conventional classroom instruction, effect sizes were substantially larger for computer-enhanced instruction (1.13) and computer-managed instruction (.72) than for computer-assisted instruction (.29) (p. 245)--suggesting that skills and drills applications of computers are much less effective than other approaches.

[43] One partial exception is the Job Skills Education Program (JSEP), a computer-based approach converted from a military program--a process sometimes referred to as "de-greening"; see "Job Skills Education Program Information Booklet" (1990); Implementation Handbook: Job Skills Education Program (1990); and JSEP Pilot Test Report (1990), all available from the Center for Educational Technology at Florida State University. JSEP includes modules for various skills--e.g., ordering numbers in a sequence, spelling correctly, finding information in two-column tables. Each civilian job has a code and is linked to a particular subset of skills--for example, machinists spend more time on algebraic and measuring skills, while word processors spend more time with report writing, grammar, and reading-related exercises. In this sense, the specific skills in which an individual receives instruction are those related to the job, and skills considered not to be job-related are ignored. However, the materials used for drill and practice within each skill area are not drawn from specific occupations; they are general materials which must be used by those training for every occupation for which that skill is relevant.

[44] In the context of whole language programs for K-12 education, see the comments of McKenna, Miller, and Robinson (1990) about the lack of evaluation evidence for (or against) whole language. The entire issue of evaluating such programs is controversial; see the rejoinder by Edelsky (1990) and the book on evaluating whole language programs by Goodman, Goodman, and Hood (1989).

<< >> Title Contents Grubb, W. N., Kalman, J., Castellano, M., Brown, C., & Bradby, D. (1991). Readin', writin' and 'rithmetic one more time: The role of remediation in vocational education and job training (MDS-309). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.
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