Pupils of the future may learn their spelling by machine, study foreign languages by oral-aural laboratory methods and attend lecture-type courses if experiments and demonstrations conducted by the Graduate School of Education and local suburban schools prove successful. The school systems of Lexington, Concord, and Newton are serving as the proving grounds for an eight-year series of innovations in new methods of elementary and secondary school teaching.

The school systems have arranged with Harvard a joint project called the "School and University Program for Research and Development." The main objectives of this program, better known as "SUPRAD," are to improve the quality of education, to promote greater efficiency in the use of time and space in the schools, and to find a means of attracting and holding highlyqualified persons in both teaching and administrative positions.

In March of 1957 SUPRAD received an initial grant of $200,000 from the Fund for the Advancement of Education, a part of the Ford Foundation. Soon thereafter the educators began planning the series of experiments and demonstrations, most of which are now well under way.

In line with the first objective, that of improving the quality of education, Newton High School established with the GSE during 1958-59 a project known as "contract correcting." This program will determine whether or not it is feasible to have qualified persons, such as housewives with college degrees, work from eight to ten hours a week correcting English themes.

Under present circumstances a typical English teacher in a public high school is likely to have five classes a day with more than thirty students per class. Thus, the assignment of as little as one piece of writing a week demands much time from the teacher--time which could be spent planning lessons and working with individual students.

The use of these "lay readers" is expected to make possible the assignment of a larger number and a greater variety of writing exercises and to enable the teacher to try out new devices of composition instruction.

After correcting the themes the reader holds individual conferences with the students to discuss the deficiences in their writing and means for improvement. For this purpose the reader keeps for each student a running list of the types and frequency of errors.

To obtain capable readers selection is made carefully from a large number of applicants and the readers are given a refresher course including a review of English fundamentals and practice in marking a variety of themes. During the school year readers have about 250 hours of work, 170 of which are spent in reading papers and 80 in conferences with students.

Evaluation of this system follows the same lines that almost all of the projects do. Detailed questionnaires will elicit opinion and comment from teachers, readers, and students. Writing tests will be used to show the progress of students who are enabled by the contract correcting system to have more training in English.

In 1959-60 this project will include other communities near Newton for the purpose of giving a broader test of the system in school situations of a different type.

"Immediate reinforcement of learning" in another common phrase in education today, and it is the principle behind the spelling machines being used at the Franklin School in Lexington. the teacher pronounces a spelling word, and the student writes a reply to it in a space provided in a small rectangular box. Then, by shifting a lever, he exposes the correct answer. He can thus compare his answer promptly with the correct one, and the immediate reinforcement that takes place is reputed to be extremely valuable in the learning process. The spelling machine also has the virtue of allowing children to work at their own rate of progress with material of the degree of difficulty most appropriate for them.

The three problems of medical care, rights and obligations of organized labor, and school desegregation have been selected for the social studies curriculum at the Concord Junior High School. These studies form the subjects for a "case method" technique of instruction, which, it is hoped, will substantially change a junior high school student's approach to contemporary national issues from simple information-giving recitation to "complex patterns of critical evaluation." The SUPRAD investigators hope to accomplish this by the use of special materials and by "probing-questioning Socratic discussion."

An observation booth equipped with one-way glass allows researchers to observe classes for purposes of evaluating the case method. Written tests before and after the experiment compare the progress of students in the "Socratic" classes with those in the control group being taught by traditional recitation methods.

Language Labs Tried

In Concord the SUPRAD experimenters are working with "language laboratories," which involve a master teacher who instructs between 50 and 200 pupils and supervises one to five non-certified native informants.