Christmas WS's!
I have heard little bits and pieces about Core Knowledge, but this study made me pay more attention.
Reported in the NY Times, a 3-year study of 1,000 Kindergarten to grade 2 students in 20 New York City public schools, showed that students who were taught with the content-rich curriculum approach of Core Knowledge made significant achievement gains over those that were taught using other methods. In fact, the biggest gain was found in Kindergarten where students showed achievement increases that were five times those of their peers.
So what is Core Knowledge? Founded in 1986 by ED Hirsch, it is an ‘educational reform movement’ that follows an education curriculum that is ‘solid, specific, shared and sequenced’. The three goals of implementation of the Core Knowledge Curriculum are to teach all of the topics included in the Core Knowledge Sequence, to teach the topics at the grade levels assigned by the Sequence, and to teach the topics to all students whenever possible. Some see the approach of the Core Knowledge Curriculum as promoting rote learning or causing a decline in students' creativity. One study disproves that theory.
Given the debate we brought to the table earlier about the math curricula taught in Canada and the concerns among university math professors that Canadian elementary kids don’t know their math facts, perhaps the results of this study lend themselves further to the debate around rote learning for elementary school students. Would our students benefit from more structure and rote learning in the early elementary years? What do you think?
