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| A Library card catalog, a SRA box and a Golden Book |
Sitting on a classic elementary school card catalog, there is a box of the SRA materials with an old Golden Book and just the corner of an old World Book Encyclopedia. Does that bring back memories or what?
This is part of the RetroEdTech collection curated by the president of Time4Learning in their offices. For more info on each items:
Card Catalogs - Card catalogs were the key to every school and public library. Users could look up books by either author or title and then find them on the shelves. They conceptual organization was the Dewey Decimal System and each library had its own physical layout and maps to where to find the books. (Quoting from Wikipedia). The Dewey Decimal Classification organizes library materials by discipline or field of study. Main divisions include philosophy, social sciences, science, technology, and history. The scheme is made up of ten classes, each divided into ten divisions, each having ten sections. The system's notation uses Arabic numbers, with three whole numbers making up the main classes and sub-classes and decimals creating further divisions. The classification structure is hierarchical and the notation follows the same hierarchy. Libraries not needing the full level of detail of the classification can trim right-most decimal digits from the class number to obtain a more general classification.[39] For example:
- 500 Natural sciences and mathematics
- 510 Mathematics
- 516 Geometry
- 516.3 Analytic geometries
- 516.37 Metric differential geometries
- 516.375 Finsler Geometry
- 516.37 Metric differential geometries
- 516.3 Analytic geometries
- 516 Geometry
- 510 Mathematics
Golden Books - The Golden Books are a great collection of kids books both story books and informational text. The Poky Little Puppy was the most popular and a particular favorite of mine. We had the 45 record of it which I remember listening to time and time again.
SRA - Did personalized instruction start with those SRA reading cards and boxes that were so popular in the 1960s and 70s? Probably not since the old one room school houses and many other educational systems presumably had systems for perssonalized or student-paced instruction. But SRA was probably a major milestone in that it was broadly used and had a defined widely used system for student paced and individualized reading. The SRA box, properly called the Reading Library Kits from Scientific Reading Associates, was a widely used system developed by Don Parker for personalizing learning and having students take some ownership of their reading. I'd like to research this more but here's a few notes from Audrey Waters Hacked Education Blog on SRA.
The cards were purposefully designed as an alternative to whole class instruction, so that students could focus on activities aimed at their particular (reading) level and move forward at their own pace. “I wanted, somehow, to individualize instruction,” Parker says in his story. Individualized instruction is often branded as “personalization....
The SRA Reading Laboratory Kit was first published in 1957, with a suggested sale price of $39.95 per box. IBM acquired SRA in 1964. It sold SRA to Maxwell Communications Company in 1988, and when the latter tried to stage a hostile takeover of CTB/McGraw-Hill the following year, the SRA assets became part of a new company, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill.
McGraw-Hill continues to publish the SRA Reading Laboratory – in print and as software – to this day. Over 127 million children have used the product.”If you like this nostalgia, you might like reading about dictionaries and Encyclopedias.
2 comments:
I absolutely remember SRA .. I was a fast reader and was segregated from the rest of the class with the SRA books until I was done with them. Now... have you found Ginn & Co's Numo & Numa "New Math" characters?
From Donald Parker's obituary in the New York Times in 2000:
Dr. Parker's program, SRA Reading Laboratories, was one of the first programs intended for remediation and encouraging students to learn at their own pace. The program, which reached its peak of popularity in the 1960's and 70's, permits individual students to advance to increasing levels of difficulty, each level keyed to a different color.
''It is desirable to provide a schooling situation in which each learner may start where he is and move ahead as fast and as far as his learning rate and capacity will let him,'' Dr. Parker said in his book ''School for Individual Excellence'' (Thomas Nelson & Son, 1963).
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