Welcome to our STEM For All Video Showcase video for the project "Exploratory Evidence on the Factors that Relate to Elementary School Science Learning Gains Among English Language Learners"! This video highlights our research plan and preliminary findings from analyses of the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS).

Our research team is leveraging the ECLS to understand the elementary school science learning trajectories of multilingual students (MLs), those who come from households where a language other than English is spoken. In our preliminary work, we document different trajectories of science test score performance for subgroups of ML students - from those receiving formal ELL services to those who are not officially recognized by schools.  Our future work will focus on identifying the science and language instructional strategies that are most predictive of positive science learning gains for ML students.

We look forward to your feedback, questions, and engaging further throughout the Showcase!

Sincerely,
F. Chris Curran
Associate Professor, University of Florida

Such important work, team! I really appreciate the effort to look more deeply into academic performance as a product of many different factors, especially language differences. (All learning is language-based to a considerable degree.) I especially respect the multi-faceted approach you are taking to defining ML students, not trying to fit everyone into one category.

Your video hints at possible interventions. I know that this work is early-stage and still at the discovery/understanding phase, but have you observed different classroom strategies that seem to benefit ML learners? In past work, I've observed that "good teaching strategies" seem somewhat generic (e.g., "know where your learner is starting out", "use formative assessment frequently"). Are there strategies that are specific to ML learners?

I appreciate the goal of this study as too often we view learning English as the main priority for the education of MLs (which is of course important as Barry describes above), but in doing so can ignore assets and other interests, like science, that students have. It sounds like the team had to grapple with both how to refer to and define Multilingual Learners--how did you define MLs? I am not terribly familiar with ECLS, I assume there is a variable for ML (or similar designation) and/or did the team have to recode?

Very interesting and important work.  Could you talk more about how you define and measure science achievement?  Thank you!

Thank you for sharing your work and your (clearly) continued passion working with multilingual learners. I have spent most of my career working this (too often) marginalized population and agree with you that even the term English learner further limits how brilliant these students are! So I celebrate you and your work and will continue to watch for the outcomes as you noted that this study was in it's preliminary phase.