April 2005:

The Institute publishes The Bill of Rights for Real Life.
In order to meet the needs of more students, the Institute published The Bill of Rights for Real Life designed to present non-college-bound students to important lessons about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.  Real Life includes short, easy-to-read narratives on the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.  New elements such as reading tips, vocabulary activities, and critical-thinking questions to aid comprehension of this essential civic knowledge.

The Institute worked with researchers at Yale University to measure the effectiveness of Real Life.  Four-hundred fifty students were taught with the Real Life curriculum and then compared to a control group of similar size that used other curriculum resources.  The former improved test scores at a rate substantially better than the control group on a test related to constitutional principles and applying those principles to real life.  There is scientific evidence that The Bill of Rights for Real Life was more effective than other methods of teaching constitutional values to less academically inclined students.

For more information about The Bill of Rights for Real Life, click here.

"The Bill of Rights for Real Life...was tested in 59 high school classrooms. [Real Life] produced significant gains in (1) the number of factual questions about the Constitution that students answered correctly and (2) the amount of information that they brought to bear when evaluating a hypothetical dilemma. [Real Life] narrowed the gap between the highest-achieving school and the lowest-achieving school by approximately 20%."
Professor Donald Green
Institute for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University