During Year Three (2005-2006) implementation
of Project Athena, experimental students continued
to obtain higher mean scores than comparison students
on measures of both critical thinking and reading
comprehension.
In Year Three, experimental teachers
continued to demonstrate higher levels of differentiated
instructional practices than their comparison peers.
Across three years (2003-2006)
Across all three years, experimental
students performed at a statistically significant
better level than comparison students, suggesting
that the project curriculum enforced critical thinking
more than the alternative employed in comparison classrooms.
The three year longitudinal data
also indicated that there was an ethnicity effect
on both the TCT and the ITBS reading assessment, with
White Americans registering the highest group performance,
followed by African Americans, and by Hispanic American
students; this pattern was true for both experimental
and comparison groups.
Longitudinally, experienced teachers
attained statistically significant better and educationally
important and larger instructional improvement than
comparison teachers, demonstrating a stable and effective
use of research-based instructional strategies across
three years' project participation.
