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Show State Education Board Gets New TV Project The Utah State Board 01 Education is one of seventeen state and provincial agencies that are supporting and participating in the design of a major television project to strengthen instruction in the essential learning skills. To be developed over a three-and-a-half year period is a series of sixty 15-minute programs for the fifth and sixth grades that will be available to American and Canadian classrooms beginning in September 1979. Intended as a major learning resource to complement existing instructional materials, the series will emphasize the critical thinking and study skills and include review of the mathematics and communication skills. The $300,000 design phase began July 1 and will continue through next June. The production phase, which has as budget of $3,500,000 is scheduled to get underway immediately after. The cooperative project is the ninth and most comprehensiveto be undertaken by state and provincial educational agencies under the organization and direction of the Agency for Instructional Television (AIT) Utah State Board of Education has participated in eight of these projects. The area of the essential learning skills was given highest priority at regional meetings of American and Canadian educators in 1973 and 1974. An American-Canadian study team, commissioned at AIT. then developed recommendations for a project in the basic learning skills. These recommendations were refined at meetings during the spring and summer of 1976 with representatives of the Utah Stae Board of Education and other interested agencies. The design phase now in progress involved a sequence of content seminars that began in early August and ended in late October. Their purpose was to identify the components of each of the skills and to develop instructional methods that w ould enable children to review and apply the skills in situations relevant to their lives. During the design year, representatives of the Utah State Board of Education and other cooperating agencies will meet at regular intervals to review the results of the seminars and the emerging curriculum design. |