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Introduction
In many academic journals and professional teacher articles, block scheduling has been called a fad. What determines whether a trend or process is a fad? The growth of "alternative scheduling" has been escalating since the early 1990's. According to Canady and Rettig (1995) approximately 50% of all high schools in the United States are currently implementing an "alternative schedule" or considering one. Just by looking at the sheer numbers, we could infer that if greater than 50% of the schools were changing and adopting an "alternative schedule" then it couldn't be a fad. By definition a fad is something that tends to fade away after time Wronkovich (1998) mentioned that "the decision whether or not to adopt block scheduling should be based on the examination of current research." He also stated that "blocking has seemingly achieved the educational status of a fad." With the support of empirical data from a research study, this article will shed some light on how to analyze or evaluate data. What is empirical research and what should you trust? "Without empirical data, schools are left with feelings and anecdotal surveys upon which to base their decisions" (Wronkovich, 1998, 6).
School Based Literature
There are many reports on the effectiveness of block scheduling in the high school. Most of these reports are unpublished documents compiled by investigative teams made up of teachers, administrators, and staff (e.g., Angola, 1996; Decatur, 1997; North Central, 1997; Penn, 1998, Wasson, 1995). Some reports are evaluation studies of the schedule process done with the assistance of outside evaluation teams (Westfield High School, 1998). Many of these reports and studies have documented parent, teacher, and study attitudes and beliefs about the schedule change. The documentation in most cases consists of percentages of answers for survey questions, followed by a list of qualitative statements. Little interpretation or statistical analysis has been completed on this survey data.
Other data from these school reports describe an increase or decrease in GPA, attendance, discipline referrals, dropout rate, standardized test scores, honor roll numbers, and graduation rates. The findings and conclusions determined from these data could be problematic when the process of collection and analysis was not mentioned in any of these reports. For example, few reports mentioned if there...