Educational Services, Inc. records

The ESI-PSSC-EDC collection is a partial record of some of the major activities of these groups in the areas of curriculum development and educational reform. The records cover the period 1957-1970 and include the beginnings of the PSSC Physics text (which preceded the formation of ESI), the merger of ESI with the Institute for Educational Innovation to form EDC in 1967 and the activities of that group until 1970.

The collection has been arranged in two series. Series I contains ESI records and Series 11 contains the records of EDC. For the sake of simplicity, the PSSC records which predate the formation of ESI have been included in Series I with the remainder of the PSSC material. The ESI portion of the collection consists almost entirely of the records of the development of the PSSC Physics course and the Introductory Physical Science (IPS) course, and the implementation of both courses in American and foreign schools. Although ESI became the Administrative roof for a number of other curriculum and educational reform projects during the early 1960's, there is no material concerning them in the collection. The ESI material has been divided into two subseries, PSSC (subseries A) and IPS (subseries B). The PSSC material consisted primarily of drafts of the PSSC Physics text, laboratory guide and teacher's guide. Occasional correspondence and commentary concerning the material was included. The drafts consisted of early working drafts, subsequent drafts and final drafts for the four volume preliminary edition of the PSSC text (1958-59) and in some cases revised drafts for the one volume commercial edition of 1960 and the second edition of 1965. The collection also included a number of galleys, primarily from the 1960 edition. Due to the extreme bulk of the material it was decided that many of the drafts could be removed from the collection. However, in order to preserve a record of how the committee worked in creating the text, the drafts of the first five chapters of the text and the corresponding sections of the laboratory and teacher's guide have been retained. The remainder of the collection was searched for correspondence and commentary which, together with the accompanying drafts, was also retained. The material has been filed in chapter order. In addition to the draft material the PSSC records include the early records of the teacher feedback on the preliminary edition. This material was collected by Gilbert Finlay's test group at the University of Illinois in 1958-1959. There is also a small amount of material on development of the laboratory portion of the course and some material concerning revisions for the second Heath edition of 1965. Because the PSSC approach was so different from the traditional high school physics course, Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey, was engaged to help develop achievement tests and College Entrance Examination Board tests for students who used the PSSC course. Records of this collaboration are present in the form of sample tests, analyses of scores and correspondence. The PSSC materials also include records of the implementation of the course which took place on a large scale following commercial publication of the text by D.C. Heath in 1960. This includes material from the PSSC In-Service Institutes for teachers conducted in the United States and abroad, copies of the PSSC Teacher letter for 1962-1966 and teacher feedback reports compiled from PSSC Area Meetings which were held all over the United States between 1961 and 1968. The feedback reports are present in both original form as Area Meeting Reports and as categorized for analysis by the Committee. Finally, the PSSC material includes a small amount of correspondence mostly regarding personnel, some brochures and articles on PSSC and copies of the several editions of the PSSC Physics text, Laboratory Guide, Teacher's Guide, and Guide to PSSC Films. The IPS material consists primarily of feedback from teachers in the pilot program during the 1965-1966 and 1966-1967 school years. The material is arranged alphabetically by teachers' names. There is also a section of feedback arranged by chapters of the IPS text. There is a small amount of feedback from the IPS college program; it is arranged in the same fashion. Finally, there is a small amount of correspondence concerning revision of the junior high school text. Series II consists of the records of the Education Development Center. Most of the material appears to be from the files of Marc S. Tucker, who was secretary of the EDC during 1969. The original order, which is by types of material, has been retained. The records consist of administrative records, including material on the merger between the Institute for Educational Innovation (IEI) and ESI which created EDC, public relations material, minutes of Board of Trustees meetings in 1968-1969 and administrative correspondence and memoranda. Also included are small amounts of material from the Committee on Operations, the Publications Committee and the EDC Library. Finally there is correspondence, reports and contracts with the United States Office of Education, primarily concerning EDC's Pilot Communities Program. The largest part of the records of EDC concerns the various programs which operated under its auspices. The largest and best documented of these is the Pilot Communities Program which engaged in educational reform activities in Washington, D.C.; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Boston; and rural Maine. In addition to records of the Program's activities in each of these areas, there is some material on the Committee for Community Educational Development, which was founded by Jerome Wiesner and which had an impact on the Boston phase of the Pilot Communities Program. There are smaller amounts of material on other EDC projects. Among them are the Workshop for Learning Things, the EDC Educational Van, the African Primary Science Program, the Follow Through Project, the instructional television program, "One Nation, Indivisible?", and the Introductory Physical Science Program. The EDC records also include material on other organizations engaged in educational reform and a small number of project reports, speeches and articles relevant to its activities. Finally, there is some material documenting EDC's input into the planning of the USOE Targeted Program in Development and Related Research and the National Institutes of Education (NIE). Included are drafts of plans for the programs, memoranda and correspondence. Approximately 58 linear feet of material was removed from the collection. The bulk of the material removed consisted of drafts of the PSSC and IPS texts. In addition, the collection originally included a large number of books. Some of these were part of the Science Study Series which was published to supplement the PSSC Physics course. There were also a number of foreign editions of the PSSC text. These have been catalogued into the Tech Collection in the Institute Archives. The collection also included a large number of other books, primarily in the physical sciences, which were apparently part of the ESI library. These were sent to the Gifts and Exchange division of the MIT libraries.