.4 Remediation

There is a lack of real time remediation. Now what do I mean by that? Real time remediation is the time it takes to resolve a student's academic problem. If a kid is having a difficult time learning something then you stop and you help with it. But the system doesn't allow for real time remediation. What is the major remedial pattern in American remediation? At the end of the year you are either promoted or you are not. If you are not promoted then you are remediated for a whole year. That is not real time remediation so you allow the remedial to pile up and it finally gets overwhelming and so you start all over again. That produces the double problem: starting all over again, the kids tend to be bored in the first part of the year when they know it all and so by the time they get to the second part of the year they have already developed bad habits in terms of the way they are responding the second time around. It doesn't even turn out to be effective remediation. Real time remediation means that when there is a problem you fix it. A good example of this comes from a masters degree program at UCLA. In every program there is always some kind of a gatekeeper course, the one that is the hardest one. In the masters program in elementary education at UCLA the gatekeeper course was statistics. A good friend of mine at UCLA, a woman named Madeline Hunter, decided that she would like to try and do something about that. So there is a summer version of this course which was taught in eight weeks. So she decided they would divide the subject matter in this statistics class into eight pieces, one week units and then they would organize it so you couldn't go on to the second week until you passed the first week's test. In a typical class you have a midterm after four weeks and by the time you get the results of the midterm five weeks have passed and after five weeks you find out for the first time that you are really behind. Isn't that a great system? Then you have three weeks to catch up all that you were behind plus learn all the stuff you have to learn in the next three weeks. Dumb system but typical. So in this system that Madeline set up, at the end of the first week you had a test and unless you met the criteria of that test you had to keep working and it turned out that some people had to work as much as eighteen hours before they could pass the test. Now a summer class accelerated five hours, was the ordinary lecture time for the class, so the range was between five and eighteen hours. But they were not allowed to start the second week until they really had the first week under their belt. The next week they had to pass the second week's test before they could go on to the third week. If the semester began requiring eighteen hours for the student that took the longest, how many hours would it be at the end of the semester for the weakest student? More or less? It turned out that by the end of the eight weeks the longest amount of time required to pass the test was eight hours, not eighteen. It came down dramatically. If you think about it, if you get off to a good start and you really understand the information, as you progress you can understand it better and you'll gain confidence and that helps you really master it. At the end of that eight weeks, 90 percent of the kids got an A in statistics. These students weren't special in any other way other than the fact that they had real time remediation.

	How is real time remediation different from traditional remediation?	Answer Here
	Mrs. Jordan is a fourth grade teacher that notices at the very beginning of the year that a certain student in her class, April Morris, is not reading as well as some of the other students in the class. How should Mrs. Jordan effectively initiate real-time remediation for April and other students' reading problems during the regular school day?	Answer Here