| From At-Risk to Excellence: Research, Theory, and Principles for Practice |
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Center For Research On Education, Diversity & Excellence
University of California, Santa Cruz
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, California 95064
Tel.: 831.459.3500
Fax: 831.459.3502
E-mail: crede@cats.ucsc.edu
Program 1 looks closely at several programmatic approaches in schools with linguistically and culturally diverse students. Research projects are 1) examining the effectiveness of a number of distinct educational programs designed to meet the needs of limited English proficient (LEP) students at both elementary and secondary levels; 2) describing programmatic features and instructional strategies that facilitate the acquisition of English for academic purposes among LEP students so they can benefit fully from instruction through English; and 3) identifying the professional development needs of educators working within these approaches. These studies will deepen our understanding of successful programs and practices and provide guidance to educators and policymakers to enable them to meet the educational needs of LEP students.
Project 1.1: A National Study of School Effectiveness for Language-Minority Students’ Long-Term Academic Achievement
Wayne P. Thomas and Virginia P. Collier, George Mason University
This study is working with 10 different school districts across the country that have large numbers of language minority students. The study focuses on the length of time language minority students need to become academically successful in a second language and on the student, program, and instructional variables that influence their academic achievement. For more information, contact Maggie Gonzales (703-993-3688).
Project 1.2: Two-Way Immersion
Donna Christian, Center for Applied Linguistics
Fred Genesee, McGill University
This study is probing instructional outcomes, student populations, and long-term effects of two-way immersion and will document program implementation in schools across the country. For more information, contact Liz Howard (202-362-0700 or liz@cal.org).
Project 1.3: The Effects of Sheltered Instruction on the Achievement
of Limited English Proficient Students
Jana Echevarria, California State University, Long Beach
Deborah Short, Center for Applied Linguistics
This project is 1) developing an explicit model of sheltered instruction; 2) using that model and a trainer-of-trainers approach in four large urban districts to train teachers in effective sheltered strategies; and 3) conducting field experiments and collecting data to evaluate teacher change and the effects of sheltered instruction on LEP students’ reading achievement and English language development. For more information, contact Jana Echevarria (310-985-5759 or jechev@csulb.edu) or Deborah Short (202-362-0700 or dshort@cal.org).
Project 1.4: Newcomers: Language and Academic Programs for Recent Immigrants
Deborah Short, Center for Applied Linguistics
This study examines newcomer programs for recently arrived secondary students with limited English proficiency and the ways in which these programs promote student transitions into U.S. schools. The study is examining the administrative, instructional, and sociocultural features of newcomer programs and comparing them with traditional programs serving LEP students. For more information, contact Deborah Short (202-362-0700 or dshort@cal.org).
Project 1.5: Upscaling for Transition: Instructional and Schoolwide
Factors to Support Latino Students’ Transition from Spanish to English
Instruction
Claude Goldenberg, California State University, Long Beach
William Saunders and Ronald Gallimore, University of California, Los Angeles
This project seeks to identify the program-feature activity settings most likely to help students make a successful transition from native language (Spanish) to mainstream English instruction, and the implementation-process activity settings best able to assist schools in adopting and using an effective transition program. This research is designed to ensure that schools across the nation can adopt and implement model transition programs. For more information, contact William Saunders (562-985-5644 or bsaunder@ucla.edu).
Project 1.6: The Sociocultural Context of Hawaiian Language Revival
and Learning
Lois A. Yamauchi, University of Hawaii
The Native Hawaiian Language Immersion Program of the State of Hawaii offers a unique opportunity for documenting the issues involved in native language revival and instruction. This project is evaluating the program, interviewing participants and community members, and collecting products and other items in order to document this adventurous and controversial program from a full variety of sociocultural perspectives. For more information, contact Lois Yamauchi (808-956-4294 or yamauchi@hawaii.edu).
Program 2 examines the characteristics, careers, pre-service education, and in-service professional development of educators of bilingual and culturally diverse at-risk students. Researchers are seeking ways to help teachers adapt their instructional methods to meet their students’ needs and become more familiar with their students’ backgrounds, culture, and language. Research is investigating the effective professional development of school leaders within the context of school reform. This program represents a comprehensive view of professional development closely tied to actual practice, and of the major issues in the field, from the characteristics of teachers through the processes of development to the policies that will enable reform.
Project 2.1: A National Study of Effective Teacher Education for Diverse
Student Populations
Leonard Baca, BUENO Center, University of Colorado
Priscilla Walton, University of California, Santa Cruz
This study is examining the structure, curriculum content, and process of 352 bilingual teacher education programs, focusing on how programs increase teachers’ capacity to teach linguistically and culturally diverse students effectively. For more information, contact Leonard Baca (303-492-5416 or leonard.baca@colorado.edu) or Priscilla Walton (831-459-2378 or pwalton@cats.ucsc.edu).
Project 2.2: Expanding the Knowledge Base on Teacher Learning and Collaboration: A Focus on Inner-City Chinese American LEP Students
Ji-Mei Chang, San Jose State University
This project is designing a model for Chinese bilingual education teachers and learning disability specialists to improve service delivery for inner-city Chinese-American students with limited English proficiency and learning disabilities. For more information, contact Ji-Mei Chang (408-924-3705 or jmchang@email.sjsu.edu).
Project 2.3: Latino Paraeducators as Teachers: Building on Funds of
Knowledge to Improve Instruction
Robert Rueda, Michael Genzuk, Ray Baca, and Guilbert Hentschke, University of Southern California
This project aims to assess the nature and use of existing funds of knowledge of bilingual Latino paraeducators. Funds of knowledge include language, social norms, and other cultural and linguistic community and family resources, such as social history, as well as bodies of knowledge that are essential to a household’s functioning and well-being. The project is studying candidates entering the teacher training program at the University of Southern California and recent graduates of the training program. For more information, contact Robert Rueda (213-740-2371 or rueda@mizar.edu).
Project 2.4: Leading for Diversity: Professional Development for School
Leaders
Sau-Lim Tsang, Rosemary Henze, Anne Katz, Edmundo Norte, and A. Reynaldo Contreras, ARC Associates
Responding to the needs of school leaders seeking solutions to racial and ethnic conflict at their schools, this study examines the characteristics and processes of exemplary leadership in fostering school unity. The study is documenting how school leaders create and maintain this unity as members of the school community engage in school reform. For more information, contact Rosemary Henze (408-924-4438 or rhenze@sjsu.edu).
This program cluster examines the contexts of student socialization, including schools, families, peers, and community, in Chicano/Latino, Asian American, Native American, African American, and low-income European American students and communities. The various research projects investigate the effects of family, peers, school, and community on students’ learning, academic skills, attitudes toward school, close relationships, and the construction of their educational, vocational, and moral values.
Project 3.1: A National Survey of School/Community-Based Organization
Partnerships Serving Students Placed at Risk
Carolyn Temple Adger, Center for Applied Linguistics
This study seeks to identify essential features of successful partnerships between schools and community-based organizations that support the academic achievement of language minority students. For more information, contact Carolyn Temple Adger (202-362-0700 or carolyn@cal.org).
Project 3.2: CBO/School Relationships in Urban Southeast Asian Communities
Adeline Becker and Francine F. Collignon, Brown University
Serei Tan, Providence School District, RI
This project investigates potential barriers to educational success, especially language, culture, and economic status, affecting Cambodians, Laotians, Hmong, and Vietnamese communities. The research also identifies factors specific to each group - such as educational background, cultural support networks, social organization, and consequences of war in the country of origin - that affect access to health and social services. For more information, contact Adeline Becker (401-274-9548 or adeline_becker@brown.edu).
Project 3.3: Navigating and Negotiating Home, School, and Peer Linkages in Early Adolescence
Margarita Azmitia and Catherine R. Cooper, University of California, Santa Cruz
This project investigates how early adolescents coordinate their family, peer, school, and community worlds, how others help or impede such coordination, and how these multiple worlds relate to school achievement. This research explores these issues in at-risk Mexican American and European American students. For more information, contact Margarita Azmitia (831-459-3146 or azmitia@cats.ucsc.edu) or Catherine Cooper (831-459-4157 or ccooper@cats.ucsc.edu).
Project 3.4: Developing Immigrant Parents’ Computer Literacy in Partnership with Students’ Learning
Richard and Jane Durán, University of California, Santa Barbara
This project is training 70 to 100 parents of third- through fifth-grade children with limited English proficiency to manipulate the word processing, graphics processing, and publishing software used by their children in their classrooms and after-school computer club activities. The project documents and evaluates outcomes of computer training on parents and children. For more information, contact Richard Durán (805-893-3555 or duran@education.ucsb.edu).
Project 3.5: Peer Group Influence and Academic Aspirations Across Cultural/Ethnic Groups of High School Students
Patricia Gandara, University of California, Davis
This study investigates the structure, formation, and influence of adolescent peer groups across four ethnic groups - Hispanics, European Americans, African Americans, and recent Asian immigrants - from lower income and working class communities in which students are commonly at risk for low academic aspirations and school failure. For more information, contact Patricia Gandara (916-752-8262).
The projects in Program 4 hold that teaching, curriculum, and the school itself should be contextualized in the experiences, skills, and values of the community. In each of the projects, the researchers accept the communities’ sociocultural activities as the contexts for making school work meaningful, and devise school activities to bridge home and school, thus building authentic classroom communities that can produce high academic achievement. Each project includes a strong professional development component by creating sociocultural activities that allow teachers to understand the students’ contexts and to develop ways to use these in the academic world. The professional development models examined include teacher as researcher, teacher as participant in the workplace, and teacher as joint worker with students.
Project 4.1: Teaching Science to Students Placed at Risk: Teacher Research Communities as a Context for Professional Development and School Reform
Beth Warren and Ann S. Rosebery, TERC, Cambridge, MA
This project investigates teacher research communities as contexts for professional development in science for teachers of language minority students. The study is developing teacher research as a model that provides teachers with the skills and knowledge they need to make professional development an integral part of their everyday practice, a practice that is sensitive to local needs and diverse student populations. For more information, contact Beth Warren (617-547-0430 or beth_warren@terc.edu).
Project 4.2: Linking Home And School: A Bridge to the Many Faces of
Mathematics
Marta Civil, Norma González, and Rosi Andrade, University of Arizona
This project examines the gap between mathematics in school and mathematics outside school for language minority students. The study will emphasize mathematics teaching that stresses students’ own construction of meaning and connections to their world outside school. Researchers are developing mathematical learning communities in the classroom, where students engage in mathematically rich situations through learning modules that capitalize on their knowledge and experiences of everyday life. For more information, contact Marta Civil (520-621-6873 or civil@math.arizona.edu).
Project 4.3: At-Risk Preschoolers’ Questions and Explanations: Science
in Action at Home and in the Classroom
Maureen Callanan, University of California, Santa Cruz
National Center for Early Development and Learning, University of
North Carolina-Chapel Hill
This study investigates "why" questions asked by young children identified as at risk for educational failure because of limited English proficiency or poverty. The study focuses on the nature of explanatory conversations at home and at school and on ways that parents and teachers can best encourage children’s natural curiosity about scientific domains. For more information, contact Maureen Callanan (831-459-3147 or callanan@cats.ucsc.edu).
Project 4.4: Developing a Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Science Curriculum
Trish Stoddart, University of California, Santa Cruz
Collaborating with three schools in the Language Acquisition through Science Education for Rural School (LASERS) project, researchers are conducting in-depth longitudinal case studies of language minority students. The project examines student learning and language development; analyzes the funds of knowledge about science in the home and community; and analyzes instructional interactions between students and teachers. For more information, contact Trish Stoddart (831-459-3850 or stoddart@cats.ucsc.edu).
Project 4.5: Teaching/Learning in the Context of African American English
Culture and Community
Michele Foster, Center for Education Studies, Claremont Graduate
School
This study examines whether teachers involved in a professional development program designed to expose them to cultural and linguistic information about African American students are able to translate this knowledge into appropriate pedagogy. Researchers document how teachers at various stages of the process incorporate this knowledge into curricular, instructional, and pedagogical practices, and how the changed practice of teachers affects the academic achievement of African American students. For more information, contact Michele Foster (510-787-1972 or michelf9@idt.net) or Cynthia Lopez Elwell (909-621-8105).
Program 5 includes projects involving the design, enactment, and evaluation of major multi-element educational programs, each of which has the potential for significant impact on local, state, tribal, and national policy. Each of these programs is based on a wealth of research data, pilot work, and the committed involvement of practitioners and community members. The projects examine how major reform efforts affect the education of several different groups of language minority and at-risk students, including those from Latino, Native American, African American, Hawaiian, and Appalachian backgrounds.
Project 5.1: Estimating the Population of At-Risk Students Using
Multiple Risk Indicators
David Grissmer, RAND
This project is developing comprehensive composite indicators of risk and using them to estimate the number, location, and socioeconomic and racial/ethnic characteristics of students at risk of educational failure. In addition, the project analyzes how these estimates may change as the population becomes more diverse in the next decade. For more information, contact David Grissmer (202-296-5000 or david_grissmer@rand.org).
Project 5.2: "Scaling Up": Effects of Major National Restructuring
Models in Diverse Communities of Students at Risk
Sam Stringfield and Amanda Datnow, The Johns Hopkins University
Steven M. Ross, and Lana M. Smith, University of Memphis
This study examines classroom, school, and district conditions and actions necessary to ensure successful culture-sensitive reforms. The project investigates the long-term effects of several leading school restructuring programs on culturally diverse student bodies and faculties of participating schools. The results provide greater understanding of school restructuring in high poverty, multicultural, multilingual contexts. For more information, contact Sam Stringfield (410-516-8834 or sstringf@scov.csos.jhu.edu).
Project 5.3: Untracking: Evaluating the Effectiveness of
an Educational Innovation
Hugh Mehan and Lea Hubbard, University of California, San Diego
This study is evaluating the effectiveness of programs that untrack low-achieving high school students by exposing them to a regular college-bound curriculum instead of the more limited curriculum offered by traditional compensatory education programs. The project is modeled on the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program in San Diego, which has been successful in assisting low-income ethnic and linguistic minority populations. For more information, contact Hugh Mehan or Lea Hubbard (619-534-1680 or bmehan@ucsd.edu or lhubbard@weber.ucsd.edu).
Project 5.4: Improving Classroom Instruction and Student Learning
for Resilient and Non-Resilient English Language Learners
Yolanda N. Padrón, Shwu-yong L. Huang, and Hersholt C. Waxman, University of Houston
This project examines individual attributes of learners, school and classroom factors, family factors, and out-of-school factors to help determine why some Latino English language learners have been successful in school, despite coming from similar sociocultural contexts as their less successful classmates. Drawing from these findings, the researchers are developing an instructional intervention for improving the reading instruction of Latino English language learners. For more information, contact Yolanda Padrón (713-743-4945 or ypadron@uh.edu).
Project 5.5: Appalachian Children’s Academic and Social Development
in Nongraded Primary Schools: Model Programs for Children of Poverty
Ellen McIntyre and Diane W. Kyle, University of Louisville
This study examines the effects of child-centered nongraded primary programs on urban African American children and rural children of Appalachian descent in terms of academic and social development. The researchers are investigating the ways in which teachers deemed as high implementors of this model are responsive to the cultural and linguistic knowledge and needs of this population. For more information, contact Ellen McIntyre (502-852-0576 or e0mcin01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu).
Project 5.6: School/Community Co-Constructed School Reform: Upscaling
from Research to Practice in a Native American Community
Roland G. Tharp, University of California, Santa Cruz
Marilyn Riding-In Feathers, Georgia Epaloose, and Carlotta Bird, Zuni (NM) School District
Based on five years of previous work in determining effective instructional practices for Zuni students, this study is documenting the processes and effects of a district-wide school reform program based on that research. Major interventions include parent/teacher focus groups, a district-wide teacher evaluation program, a community-based curriculum, and introduction of bilingual instruction. For more information, contact Roland Tharp (831-459-3868 or tharp@cats.ucsc.edu).
Project 5.7: Case Studies of Exemplary Native American Education Conducted in the Context of Native Language, Culture, and Community
William Demmert, Western Washington University
This project is creating a national consortium of programs and schools that promote improved academic performance, citizenship, and traditional values in Native American schools. The project is creating regional networks that focus on improving schools and schooling and incorporate appropriate case-study findings into their own programs. These networks and the momentum created by this project will sustain tribal reform efforts over an extended period of time. For more information, contact William Demmert (360-650-3032).
Project 5.8: The Role of Classroom Social Organization in School Adjustment and the Development of Peer Relationships and Teacher-Student Relationships
Peggy Estrada, University of California, Santa Cruz
This project examines the nature of the social organization of culturally diverse classrooms, including peer relationships, teacher-student relationships, and school adjustment. For more information, contact Peggy Estrada (831-459-3649 or peggye@cats.ucsc.edu).
The projects in Program 6 seek to develop a conceptual framework for the assessment of limited English proficient students, validate the use of currently available standardized measures on these students, and examine the cognitive development of special education English language learners.
Project 6.1: Assessment of Language-Minority Students
Lorrie A. Shepard, University of Colorado, Boulder
Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST), University of California, Los Angeles
This project is bringing together experts in language acquisition, content teaching in bilingual classrooms, and assessment to frame and commence a research agenda for the assessment of language minority students. This collaborative effort will provide a new national agenda and impetus for reform in student evaluation and assessment. For more information, contact Lorrie Shepard (303-492-6937 or lorrie.shepard@colorado.edu).
Project 6.2: Socioculturally-Based Alternative Assessment of Cognitive
Competence for Schooling
Sybil Rose Kline, University of California, Santa Cruz
Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST), University of California, Los Angeles
This project explores current assessment practices in the field of bilingual special education and investigates some possible alternatives to existing practices. Project activities include 1) a literature review and survey of practitioners, 2) research and development of alternative assessment instruments for cognitive, literacy, and language development, and 3) recommendations for a coordinated bilingual special education assessment team approach for implementing a socioculturally based model. For more information, contact Sybil Kline (831-459-3672 or sybil@cats.ucsc.edu).
Project 6.3: Alternative Assessments for Exceptional Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students
Sybil Rose Kline, University of California, Santa Cruz
The innovative features of this project are the application of sociocultural theory to the practice of bilingual special education and the initiation of the "opportunity model" as a guiding framework for special education services. This model, which is based on established Center principles, begins to construct a framework for equal educational opportunities for culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education. This project extends the work begun in Project 6.2. For more information contact Sybil Kline (831-459-3672 or sybil@cats.ucsc.edu).
