Reaching Standards with Traditionally Underserved Groups of Students:
Expanding the Effectiveness of the Direct Instruction Model

The National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI) is submitting this collaborative application under the Comprehensive School Reform Quality Initiatives (Category 2) to improve the quality of the Direct Instruction (DI) Model and build its capacity to meet the needs of traditionally underserved students, especially students with disabilities (SWDs) and student with limited English proficiency (SLEs). Two nationally recognized providers of the Direct Instruction Model, NIFDI and the Center for Applied Research in Education (CARE), propose to collaborate with researchers from the universities of Texas, Florida, and Eastern Washington in the development and testing of specific strategies for successfully bringing SWDs and SLEs to reach standards.

Our objectives cover a range of specific needs to reach this goal, including alignments with state standards in 12 states, an improved progress monitoring system, two new instructional programs, four specific research studies evaluating strategies for serving SWDs and SLEs and a comprehensive, longitudinal research study to determine whether the deleterious effects of uncontrollable within-student characteristics and environmental factors can be overcome with the highly effective and replicable DI model.

We expect to expand the DI implementation model to be sufficiently powerful to eliminate the deleterious effects on learning of the less controllable factors that usually predict performance, such as poverty, low initial achievement levels, and language differences. The result will be a replicable implementation model that can successfully enable schools identified for improvement across the nation to raise the performance of SWDs and SLEs to meet their state's definition of adequate yearly progress (AYP).