Yes, but we're not talking about long-term research here. It wouldn't be hard at all to get a bunch of volunteers interested in learning a language, and randomly assign them to one of the various different treatments popular in the industry (MT, Pimsleur, Rosetta, traditional classroom instruction, whatever). It would take less than a year, probably.

(Various choices would be up to the experimenter, like whether they wanted to control time so all groups spent, like, an hour a day or whatever, or examine the time students chose to spend themselves as one of the dependent variables, or whatever. Obviously it would be best to do it both ways.)

Obvious, easy, and valuable. Just nobody with the resources has the incentive or the perspective to see that it should be done.

Anyway, I'd expect to see a pretty high failure rate even for the MT courses. Just a significantly lower failure rate than any of the other courses.

Yes, and I should make clear that Solity didn't say, 'The MT courses work well, wherever they work well, due to approximating DI'. He presented DI more as one of many interesting little connected pieces (many of which were pretty much fluff), rather than as an overarching explanation.

The interpretation that, "If dalmatians are metaphorically the gold standard, then the MT courses are mangy mutts in an industry where everyone else is painting black spots and pinning floppy ears on chickens," is mine.

Yeah, and all of what Cainntear was talking about later in that post with "teach confusable things separately" is covered in Chapter 10 of ToI, "Introducing coordinate members to a set".

[And yes, there's a typo in the table on the first page. Awareness of abstract feature "C" rules out example 6. It doesn't have to wait until feature "(D)" is brought to attention.]

I really think both the places where MT follows DI principles, and the places where he fails, should jump out to anyone familiar with both.

Which makes me wonder about how familiar Solity was with ToI, because I don't remember his exploration of the samenesses and differences as very good. How much of that recollection is due to my lack of familiarity at the time, I'm not sure, but I don't think all of it. Don't think I'm gonna reread it any time soon, though.

No, although I'd like to. I've just been really inactive the past couple weeks. Settling in to the internship and making sure I'm actually learning what I'm supposed to be learning there is still taking most of my energy during the week, and then I found out my mom had cancer (she just had a little bit, they got it out completely, and the chances of it coming back are apparently 'virtually nil' with just five weeks of radiation... but still, totally killed my productivity for one weekend), and then lazing around with a cold the next weekend. Yeesh.

The most I've been doing is poking at a post tentatively titled "A dry introduction to the empirical evidence on DI's effectiveness", essentially a summary of "Research on Direct Instruction", since I was feeling like maybe the best thing to do would be to take a step back and present a better explanation of why people should be interested in the theory before explaining the theory itself. (Yes? No? Maybe?)

MT was never supposed to be presented as evidence itself, but as an explanation for the initial inspiration for strategies for the "what we can do for DI / what DI can do for us" thing. Obviously, it would be way better to wait until many other things are explained before I tackle that one, but I might have to try a bit anyway just to keep the confusion down since it's already out there...

Anyway, I'll go ask Misha if he wants to work on the 'top-level post on DI' project now, and if he could use me for it.

Yes, Project Follow-Through had some problems, but I don't think it's likely that those problems provided a systematic bias towards DI sufficient to explain away the huge differences as non-significant, especially since similar results were replicated in many smaller studies that were in a situation where better random assignment etc was possible.

"Research on Direct Instruction" (Adams and Engelmann, 1996) goes into much better detail on Follow-Through and those other experiments.

Actually, it basically covers three different types of studies:

• Those dealing with the relative effectiveness of DI compared to other models (in a meta-analysis)

• Those pinning down the internal details of DI theory, validating unique predictions it makes (about the effect specific variations in sequencing, juxtaposition, wording, pacing, etc should have on student performance). Only one prediction ever came out differently than expected: That a sequence of examples starting with negatives would be more efficient at narrowing in on a concept for the learner. It was found that while this did hold with more sophisticated older learners, more naive younger students simply interpreted the, 'This is not [whatever]' to mean, 'This is not important, so don't attend to this'.

• Those demonstrating 'non-normative' outcomes. For instance, calling Piagetian developmental theory into question.

You should be able to find the book at a local university library. Could you get your hands on it? I'd love to hear what you think after reading it!