Reply: Precision Teaching in the High School Classroom: A Commentary

Abstract

As in his initial review of the manuscript, Brophy's main concerns are with philosophical implications and potential misapplications of the findings. While some of these concerns warrant discussion, it is apparent that Brophy fails to see the main implications of the study. First, the results of Experiment 1 suggest that there may be more effective ways to utilize a five-day school week. If many students can reach academic criteria in three days, the teacher can devote two days to the slower students. Second, the results of Experiment 2 suggest the performance/work contingency as one method of motivating students to increase academic performance. From a theoretical standpoint, how different is this performance/work contingency from the contingent relationship between academic performance and high school athletics or academic performance and college scholarships? Brophy states that the data are presented more positively than they should be. The focal point of Brophy's concern is that the data are blocked into thirds and re-analyzed despite an initial overall significant effect in favor of the PT procedure. Brophy states that since the initial analysis was significant, the follow-up blocking and analysis are not needed and the poorer performance of the bottom one-third of PT students, as compared with the bottom one-third of TT students, should be ignored. It seems that this method of data analysis suggested by Brophy would positively bias the results more than the method of data analysis used in the study. As stated in the Experiment 1 Results and Discussion section, the rationale for blocking the data into thirds, despite the overall significant effect, was that there appeared to be the differential effect. By only reporting the overall effect the reader would be left unaware of the differential PT effect.