Parents, principals, and policymakers who want to know what research shows about the effectiveness of the Core Knowledge (CK) curriculum will find a useful summary in an article in the Core Knowledge Foundation newsletter. It summarizes three large studies that compare the academic performance of students in CK schools with pupils in control groups. In Oklahoma City, students taught in CK classrooms outperformed their peers in other schools on both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests of reading, vocabulary, math, and social studies. In another study, students at twelve schools with well-implemented CK programs outperformed a control group (though youngsters whose schools had a low level of CK implementation did not). The article also summarizes research showing that students with greater cultural literacy tend to do better in school and to achieve higher scores on standardized tests, suggesting that schools that neglect content knowledge in favor of teaching children abstract skills may be doing them a disservice.
"How Do We Know Core Knowledge Works?" by Matthew Davis, Common Knowledge, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2003 (Not available online. To receive a copy, e-mail Chip Shields at [email protected])