Eric.ed.gov – An Instructional Guide Concerning the Highly Successful Teaching & Motivating Practices of Jaime Escalante for the Escalante Math Project at East Los Angeles College.

This instructional guide, one product of a large-scale research project on Jaime Escalante and his Mathematics and Science Program, describes the teaching and motivating strategies that he uses to bring about high academic achievement among poor minority urban youth in Los Angeles (California). The first part of five describes a pilot test in which a colleague and an administrator who have worked with and observed Escalante rated a list of successful techniques according to the degree to which they explained Escalante’s teaching success. Part 2 describes the responses of senior high school students who had been Escalante’s students for 3 or 4 years to a similar questionnaire. Part 3 shows the results of a similar rating process by several of Escalante’s colleagues, which found a 74 percent level of agreement between students and colleagues. Part 4, the longest section, contains the taped transcription of an interview with Escalante designed to determine whether or not he agreed with his students’ ratings of his teaching techniques and to ask whether his students had left out anything. Part 5 discusses the study’s findings. Extensive appendixes contain information on the Jaime Escalante Mathematics and Science Program, questions from the pilot test, questions from the other phases of the study, student responses, abstracts of the paper, correspondence, and the study contract. Contains 29 references. (JB)