Massive Intervention and Child Intelligence: The Milwaukee Project in Critical Perspective

The Milwaukee Project, conducted by R. Heber, H. Garber, and others with small numbers of inner-city preschool children, has been described as raising IQs from the dull-normal to the superior ranges. Despite its fame, however, it has rarely been studied technically or critically. An earlier (1972) writing by Page reached the conclusion that the project was characterized by biased selection of treatment groups, contamination of criterion tests, failure to specify the treatments, and inaccessibility of data to professional analysis. This newer article reviews the current status of these problems and presents information that has become available since 1972. The long-promised final report has not been issued, but what evidence there is suggests a decline of the experimental, massive-intervention children to the level of the untreated controls in those measures, such as school reading, which are not under the control of the project.