Draft:Great Falls Precision Teaching Project

Great Falls Precision Teaching Project

The Great Falls Precision Teaching Project was the largest demonstration of using precision teaching in an educational setting. Conducted over six years at Sacajawea Elementary School in Great Falls, Montana. It aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of using precision teaching—a subdiscipline of behavior analysis—as a supplement to the school district’s curriculum. The project included students and teachers from general and special education classrooms and resulted in considerable academic improvements across grade levels and instructional setting.

Origins of the Project

Key Contributors and Influences

Ray Beck and Richard (Dick) Clement organized and oversaw the Great Falls Precision Teaching project. At the time of the project, Beck served as Director of Special Education for Great Falls Public Schools. He coordinated teacher training, submitted grants to fund the work, and served as key decision maker. Clement was the principal of Sacajawea Elementary School, which served as the primary training site for participating teachers. Sacajawea Elementary School was chosen as the first site for its staff’s enthusiasm about the project’s potential.

Ogden Lindsley, the founder of precision teaching, significantly shaped the project’s educational model. He influenced the emphasis of measuring student performance using standard units, taking a recursive and inductive approach to learning, holding teachers accountable for student learning, and focusing on student strengths. In 1970, Lindsley addressed 600 faculty and administrators in the Great Falls Public Schools and continued consulting on the project up to three times per academic year.

Several prominent precision teachers also served as consultants and their insights refined the model over time. For example, Harold Kunzelmann adapted worksheets from a precision teaching project in Washington State for use in Great Falls. Other consultants included Eric Haughton, Tom Lovitt, Owen White, Carl Binder, and Wally Berard, who each spent two or three days at Sacajawea Elementary School.

The Sacajawea Plan

The Sacajawea Plan was a follow up project developed from an experiment conducted by the Great Falls Public Schools Special Education Department. The experiment evaluated the effectiveness of precision teaching techniques across six elementary schools—three experimental schools and three control schools. The project was funded with a grant awarded by the Montana Office of Public Instruction. In the experiment, Great Falls teachers and staff without experience in precision teaching completed a 5-day training at the University of Washington’s Experimental Education Unit. The training was based on Harold Kunzelmann’s earlier work from Washington State. Upon returning to Montana, these teachers and staff received follow-up training and support to implement the methods in their classrooms.

The Sacajawea Plan focused on integrating precision teaching methods, previously only used in special education classrooms, into general education classrooms. Sacajawea Elementary School, one of the three experimental schools that also served as the training site for the project, lent its name to the plan. Teachers at Sacajawea reported that the instructional challenges they faced with students receiving special education services were the same as those in general education, such as deficits in reading, spelling, and math. They identified issues including gaps in prerequisite skills (such as handwriting), slow performance despite higher levels of accuracy, and an inability to maintain skills over time.

Precision Teaching and the Great Falls Precision Teaching Project

Precision teaching is a system for measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of instruction. Although it can be used to guide instruction for a range of learner profiles and skills, most documented applications of precision teaching have taken place in educational settings. The approach originated with Ogden Lindsley, who developed its core methods while working with patients at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts. Lindsley later introduced the same measurement techniques in special education classrooms in the mid-1960s.

The Great Falls Precision Teaching Project is widely regarded as one of the most successful demonstrations of precision teaching, and informed later development of the precision teaching. The model used at Great Falls evolved, but is defined by the following components: teaching a specific skill, setting performance standards, sequencing curriculum, completing daily practice using one-minute timings, monitoring and recording performance using the standard celeration chart, following decision-making rules, and managing curricular decisions based on student performance. Implementing the model required 20–30 minutes of classroom time per day and eventually involved 100% of Sacajawea’s staff.

As the model expanded and more teachers were trained in the region, professional development sessions began to focus on the history and rationale for the precision teaching, strategies for remediation and skill building, charting student data, and classroom implementation practices.

Project Outcomes

Evidence of Effectiveness

The success of the Great Falls Precision Teaching Project was twice validated to the United States Office of Education’s Joint Dissemination and Review Panel. Unlike many compensatory education programs that demonstrated short-term gains followed by a “washout,” the outcomes associated with the precision teaching model proved durable. A three-year follow-up study found sustained academic improvements across multiple subject areas.

First Review

The first review, conducted in 1975, presented evidence on the impact precision teaching had on the performance of students with mild learning disabilities over one academic year. The study included data from six schools of similar sizes and compositions (e.g., class sizes, teacher-student ratios, family income levels). Three schools implemented precision teaching (experimental group) and three served as control schools, each with students in the lower quartile of the first, second, and third grade. Results showed that 15 (79%) of the experimental groups performed statistically superior on post-test examinations when compared to their control group counterparts.

Second Review

The second review, conducted in 1979, analyzed data from a longitudinal study of student performance across multiple years. The study followed cohorts of fourth grade students across consecutive years. Each cohort had one additional year of exposure to the model than the previous group. Performance was assessed on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and students at Sacajawea consistently outperformed other district fourth graders in reading and arithmetic. Across the four years the study took place, students at Sacajawea improved their percentile ranking by nearly 25 points in reading and 15 points in arithmetic. In 1981, as a result of the second review, the State of Montana Office of Public Instruction approved the integration of the precision teaching model into math and English programs at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.

Dissemination

On-Site Trainings

The precision teaching model developed during the Great Falls project was documented in a manual designed to help guide implementation. Educators learning how to use the model observed other teachers implement it in their classrooms during a three-day on-site training at Sacajawea Elementary School. On-site training at Sacajawea was funded at the state and federal levels, and administered by Coordinators and Lead Trainers, who served as the frontline workers during the project. After the three-day on-site training, trainees received follow-up training and support. During follow-up training sessions, trainees were observed implementing the precision teaching model, shared their own data with other trainees, and received instruction on best practices based on newly obtained data.

Off-Site Trainings

As interest in the model grew, three-day off-site (referred to as second generation) training sessions on the precision teaching model were offered across the United States, and internationally, including in England, Canada, and at the Department of Defense Dependent Schools. These sessions were led by program coordinators and lead trainers who had received training at Sacajawea.

Second-generation sites were required to hold certification that demonstrated their adherence to the original precision teaching model used at Sacajawea Elementary School. Certified trainers used nearly identical materials, training structures, and activities as those found in the original project. Trainers were required to maintain their certification through ongoing competency checks. As the demand for training grew, conferences were eventually held for certified trainers to share the outcomes of their activities and refine their practices. Collectively, on-site and off-site trainings resulted in over 8,000 educators being trained in the model, impacting roughly 153,000 K-12 students.

Invited Presentations

The results of the project have been shared at multiple invited presentations for organizations including:

• The Association for Behavior Analysis International
• The Council for Exceptional Children (Montana, National, and CEC World Congress in Scotland)
• The National Association of School Psychologists
• The American Association of School Administrators
• The National Association of Elementary Principals
• The National Association of Middle School Principals
• The National School Boards Association
• The Standard Celeration Society
• The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

Life After the Project

After formal funding ended for the first six years, the influence of the project lasted at least another six years. In 1985, the materials from the Great Falls Precision Teaching Project were published by Sopris West Educational Services. The materials published included the Basic Skill Builders Handbook and One Minute: Academic Functional Assessment and Interventions, which captured the core curricular components of the model.