Beginning in 1972, the Kamehameha Elementary Education Project or KEEP (Tharp & Gallimore, 1979; 1982) operated a kindergarten to third grade research and development school in urban Honolulu. KEEP was funded by the Kamehameha Schools and the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Estate. The Kamehameha Schools was founded in 1887 by the estate of the Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop for the benefit of Native Hawaiian children.
From the beginning, the goal of KEEP was the development of a reading program that was effective and would be accommodated to the culture and language of the children. In planning the work, we were guided by the principle that programs developed at KEEP should require the least number of changes in public school practices. Thus we took special care that the new cohort of kindergarteners that entered the R & D school each fall should represent the population at risk for underachievement; we kept class size at public school levels (30 to 1 at the time); we used no aides; we avoided radical curriculum innovations that would be rejected or could not be funded in the public schools. The aim was to make what evolved a credible model for the public schools.
The principle of least changes was also consistent with the assumption that Hawaiian children were capable of learning as well as any group of children. If the assumption were true, it ought to be possible to adjust instructional practices to be effective, without a radical change in public school operation. The least change principle was consistent with the then emerging view that the school problems of cultural minorities should be understood in terms of differences not deficits. If Hawaiian children were not deficient, then we should be able to find ways to teach them if we took advantage of their strengths.
It took five years of research and development to evolve an effective reading program. As a group, children taught with the KEEP program now achieve on standardized reading tests at or above national norms, while comparison groups continue to score well below average. Both internal and external evaluations of the program are available (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988). These analyses indicate that the program worked both at the KEEP research school and in public school classrooms.
Although the KEEP program of research and development in Hawaii ended in the 1990s, KEEP-related activity continued at the University of California, Santa Cruz as part of the National Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE).
A summary and update of the status of these lines of investigation and action are available at a new location of CREDE at the University of California, Berkeley. For a list of CREDE and other post-KEEP publications click here.
For a comprehensive summary of KEEP’s research and findings click this Link
For an extended recounting of KEEP, see Tharp and Gallimore (1988).
Key KEEP Publications
Tharp, R. G. and Gallimore, R. (1979). The ecology of program research and development: A model of evaluation succession. In: L. B. Sechrest (Ed.), Evaluation Studies Review Annual, Vol. 4., 39-60. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Tharp, R. G. and Gallimore, R. (1982). Inquiry processes in program development. Journal of Community Psychology, l0, l03-ll8.
Tharp, R. G. and Gallimore, R. (1988) Rousing Minds to Life: Teaching, Learning, and Schooling in Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Tharp, R. G., Jordan, C., Speidel, G. E., Au, A. H., Klein, T. W., Calkins, R. P., Sloat, K. C. M., and Gallimore, R. (1985). Product and process in applied developmental research: Education and the children of a minority. In M. E. Lamb, A. L. Brown, and R. B. Rogoff (Eds.), Advances in Developmental Psychology, Vol. III. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Weisner, T. S., Gallimore, R., and Jordan, C. (1988). Unpackaging cultural effects on classroom learning: Native Hawaiian peer assistance and child-generated activity. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 19, 4, 327-353. (Reprinted in R. N. Roberts (Ed.) 1993. Coming Home to School: The Sociocultural Context of Early Education, (pp. 59-90). Norword, NJ: Ablex Publishing).
Other KEEP papers
Gallimore, R. and Au, K. Hu-Pei (1979). The competence/incompetence paradox in the education of minority culture children. In M. Cole, Y. Engestrom, and O. Vasquez (Eds.), Mind, Culture, & Activity: Seminal Papers from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gallimore, R. and Tharp, R. G. (1981). The interpretation of elicited sentence imitation in a standardized setting. Language Learning, 3l, 2, 369-392.
Gallimore, R., Dalton, S. and Tharp, R. G. (1986). Self-regulation and interactive teaching: The impact of teaching conditions on teachers' cognitive activity. Elementary School Journal, 86, 5, 613-631.
Weisner, T. S., Gallimore, R. and Tharp, R. G. (1982). Concordance between ethnographer and folk perspectives: Observed performance and self-ascription of sibling caretaking roles. Human Organization, 4l, 3, 237-244.