Precision Teaching in the High School Classroom: A Necessary Step Towards Maximizing Teacher Effectiveness and Student Performance

Experiment 1 was designed to compare the effectiveness of precision teaching (PT) with the effectiveness of traditional teaching (TT). The contigent incentive incorporated into the PT procedure was availability of two optional activity days per week. The subjects were 328 high school students from 12 classes at five suburban Chicago high schools. The 12 classes were divided into matched pairs. Courses making up each pair were Algebra, Accounting, Biology, Chemistry, History, and Physics. The same teacher taught both courses in a given pair. During Phase I (12 weeks) all 12 of the classes were taught using the TT procedure. At the beginning of Phase II (12 weeks) one class from each matched pair was randomly selected and shifted to the PT procedure. There were no significant performance differences for the students in the two groups during Phase I. During Phase II the top two-thirds of PT students performed significantly better than the top two-thirds of TT students. The bottom one-third of the PT students performed significantly worse than the bottom one-third of the TT students. On a long term retention test given to the top two-thirds of students in both groups approximately five months after the completion of Phase II, the PT students retained significantly more material than the TT students. At the completion of Phase II, 21 of the PT students were performing poorly in class because of competition from their outside employment. In Experiment 2 the number of hours an employer allowed a student to work was made contingent upon the level of the student's classroom performance. The mean percentage of total points earned by the students increased from 47.5 to 83.7. The results of the two experiments suggest that the poor academic performance of many students is due to an interaction between teaching procedure and incentive motivation. Implications and advantages of the PT procedure are discussed.