Archives: elementary

Immigration has long been a heated topic in the United States, and schools are often at the center of debates. We are seeing a drastic rise in the number of immigrant students in our classrooms today. This new population of students brings with it a new set of challenges. To help address the needs of today’s immigrant students, Dr. Xue Lan Rong, professor of social studies education and sociology of education at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Education, and Dr. Judith Preissle, professor at the University of Georgia, draw on census data and current educational research to make recommendations for educators in their book, Educating Immigrant Students in the 21st Century: What Educators Need to Know.

A Brief history of immigration in the United States

Immigration patterns in the United States is widely seen as happening in four distinct waves. The first wave was between 1790 and 1820 and was primarily comprised of British and northern Europeans. The second wave ran until 1860 as the U.S. was undergoing rapid industrialization and expansion. This wave was primarily comprised of Irish and German immigrants. The third wave was comprised of mostly southern and eastern Europeans and ended in 1914. Immigration to the U.S. was then slowed by World War I and the introduction of an immigration policy that set quotas for the number of immigrants allowed into the U.S. based on their country of origin. This was in efforts to maintain the dominance of northern and western Europeans in the U.S.’s ethnic balance. Immigration was further slowed by the Great Depression and World War II. The fourth wave of immigration didn’t start until the quota system for immigration was done away with in 1965. This wave is still running and is widely dominated by Hispanic and Asian immigrants.

Facts about immigrant children

In 2005 there were approximately 11 million children who were considered to be children of immigrants. That is roughly 20 percent of all school-aged children in the United States. A majority of immigrant children experience more social and economic difficulties than native-born children. For example, immigrant children tend to have challenges in English proficiency and are more likely to be poor and to live in inner-city areas. As a result, immigrant families often live in racially, ethnically, and linguistically segregated neighborhoods. Compared with the general school-age population, immigrant children in general and within each racial-ethic group were more likely to have physical disabilities and less likely to have health insurance.

Immigration and schools

Schools are regarded to be the most important social institution for absorbing new immigrants; there are few other institutions as directly affected by immigration as our nation’ s schools. These children bring different life experiences and beliefs, cultural communication patterns, languages, and educational traditions with them when they go to school. However, U.S. public education has, historically, widely rejected maintaining the heritage language and cultural values of immigrant children. Instead, there has been an emphasis on a rapid Americanization in curricula and instruction aimed at assimilating immigrants to the norms of the dominant culture. This subtractive model approach positions the immigrant students as having multiple deficits and facing many unnecessary obstacles in finding academic success.

The current emphasis on testing in our schools is particularly difficult for immigrant students because it requires rapid English acquisition and quick cultural adjustment regardless the age of arrival, age-appropriate education attainment before the entrance of U.S. school, etc. Immigrant students bring a wide diversity of individual strengths, knowledge, and cultural identity to the classroom that these tests place a diminished value on. It’s important that teachers find ways to celebrate and develop these differences. To do this, it is important to keep in mind the needs of immigrant students at different ages. From birth to age 8, children start to develop a strong self-consciousness and sense of identity. It is important to involve parents during this time to find the best path and program for their children. During middle childhood, it is critical to help children understand how experiences with racism can influence the paths of their academic futures and career aspirations. This will help them negotiate barriers they may encounter. Through adolescence, it is important that immigrant students have access to programs focused on helping students finish school, acquire work skills, postpone parenthood, and keep physically and mentally healthy. This can help empower students to overcome barriers of unsafe neighborhoods, family poverty, and lack of health insurance or inadequate access to health care. To work with immigrant students of any age, community outreach is an important strategy.

So what?

In recent years, North Carolina has become a leading New Gateway state for immigration and has seen drastic increases in immigrant populations. Compared to the traditional gateway states, schools and educators in the New Gateway states are facing more and different challenges, such as a higher percentage of recent immigrants, newer immigrant ethnic communities with less resource, more demanding on language and other services, etc. It is imperative that we seek to better understand and serve the growing number of immigrant students we are seeing in our classrooms. Educating Immigrant Students in the 21st Century: What Educators Need to Know offers insightful and informed recommendations or how to best serve our growing immigrant population for educators at all levels. More of Dr. Rong and Dr. Preissle’s recommendations will be explored in future postings here on The Well.

Tips from Dr. Rong

Understand how the demographics are changing.

Before any of us are able to plan effective strategies for working with our immigrant students, we must first understand their social and economic profiles. Only then will we be able to make sound social and educational decisions that have our students’ best interests in mind.

Be empathetic.

Immigrant children are often in a very difficult situations. Their home culture may not be aligned or be conflicted with the dominant culture in schools. Adding to this situation, they are in a country where issues of immigration are highly political and emotionally charged. It is important that we, as teachers, are able to put aside our personal opinions about the politics of immigration and do whatever we can to help every single student in our classrooms grow and learn. It is also important that educators take an additive approach, i.e. recognizing the strengths in immigrant cultures and help these students learn based on the knowledge they have. It is important that we recognize the situation our immigrant students are in and identify what we can do to help them find success in our classrooms.

Act now.

The United States has entered a new era of immigration. Recent immigrants and their children now comprise more than 20 percent of the population in the U.S. The time to act is now. The immigrant population has been overlooked in our schools for too long.

Researcher bio

Dr. Rong’s 25-year career includes teaching, research, consultative and administrative experience in the United States and China, including six years as a K-12 literature, history and geography teacher in rural and urban areas of the People’s Republic of China. Inspired to make a real difference in children’s lives and the society in which they live, she uses interdisciplinary research to explore three aspects of educational equality: the education of immigrant children of various ethnic groups; the education of Asian-American children and education in China – especially the education of migrant children in China’s urbanization movement. Dr. Rong’s major contributions to her field include elaborations on theories that conceptualize the relationship between variable educational achievement patterns and the multiple stages of children’s socialization into American society. Her more recent studies attempt to link the updated theories and research findings to educational policies and practices. This research seeks to provide recommendations for schools, immigrant families and their communities so they can help immigrant children adjust to school and society.

A full biography can be found on the School of Education website

In every classroom you can find students who need extra help to stay on pace with the classroom content but do not qualify for the additional support systems offered by the school. To compound the situation, schools and teachers in rural areas often have limited resources and limited access to quality professional development.

Dr. Lynne Vernon-Feagans, the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Early Childhood and Intervention and Literacy and Professor of Psychology at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education, assembled a team of researchers to address this situation for young, struggling readers in rural communities. Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) is an intervention strategy that combines professional development and student instruction through synchronous web-based conferencing.

Targeted Reading Intervention

Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) is a classroom-based, teacher-delivered reading intervention designed for rural struggling kindergarten and first-grade readers. Teachers participating in TRI are engaged in four professional development activities: 1) a three-day face-to-face summer institute as an introduction to TRI content, 2) weekly or biweekly literacy coaching via webcam, 3) weekly grade-level meetings to discuss children’s reading performance and progress via real-time web conferencing, and 4) monthly or bimonthly two-hour professional development sessions designed to meet needs expressed by the teachers via real-time web conferencing.

The TRI instructional model has teachers working one-on-one with struggling readers while other students in the classroom are working at literacy centers, working independently, or receiving instruction from a teaching assistant. The one-on-one instruction consists of a fifteen-minute lesson that comprises four components: re-reading for fluency, word work, guided oral reading, and extension activities.

Elements of one-on-one instruction

In re-reading for fluency, the teacher asks the student to re-read a selection that the student has previously read and that is at the student’s independent reading level. The purpose is for the student to develop word identification automaticity and reading fluency. In word work, the teacher is provided with a small collection of diagnostically-driven strategies for helping the student manipulate, say, and write words and text to develop phonological decoding and sight-word recognition. These strategies help students develop an understanding of alphabetic principles, sound-symbol relationships, phonemic segmenting and blending abilities, decoding and sight word practice, and, eventually, how to chunk and read multi-syllabic words.

In guided oral reading, the teacher employs strategies to scaffold a child’s oral reading of an instructional text, paying particular attention to the scaffolding of the the child’s ability to summarize, predict, and make connections and inferences. Finally, during extensions children are encouraged to practice reading by employing the skills they have learned with parents, classmates, and even principals. This increases the students’ oral language and, most importantly, confidence.

The research

A comparative study was conducted, examining the differences in outcomes for students between schools that received the TRI treatment (the experimental group) and those that did not (the control group). Within each teacher’s classroom five struggling readers were identified as the experimental or control focal group and five students reading at or above grade level were identified as the experimental or control non-focal group. The results of the study showed that the experimental focal group students, on average, scored higher than the control focal group students in word attach, letter/word identification, and passage comprehension. There was no significant difference between the groups when it came to the spelling of sounds.

Ultimately, students who received TRI significantly outperformed students who did not. All students in TRI classrooms — both struggling and nonstruggling readers — had higher selected reading outcomes than students in the control classrooms.

So what?

Research has shown that if a student does not develop reading skills by the end of first grade, he or she is likely to never read on grade level. TRI is a proven method to get students reading on grade level through coaching.

Tips from Dr. Vernon-Feagans

Creating an instructional match can be challenging, but it is important.

It can be a challenge to individualize the instruction in the classroom because so many things must be taken into account. However, matching instruction to the particular needs of the individual students is of the utmost importance, especially for students who struggle.

One-on-one time makes a huge difference.

While it can be challenging to provide prolonged one-on-one attention to students, it can make a huge difference. Spending the time to address the individual needs of a student will help him or her progress academically. Additionally, students relish the individual attention they receive from their teachers.

No one has all the answers.

It is very common for teachers to feel as if they need to be able to address every situation in their classrooms themselves. As such, there can be an unnecessary stigma attached to receiving instructional support. This shouldn’t be the case. Teachers are asked to do so much with so little; they should not feel ashamed to make use of the many different individuals and organizations that want to help teachers and students.

Pat yourself on the back every day.

I’m sure it’s not news to you that teaching is hard work. Sometimes, it’s really hard. Teachers often underestimate the impact they have on their students. A small word, a kind gesture — these things can impact the rest of a child’s life. As teachers, it is often hard to see this because our students leave our classroom, and often our lives, at the end of the year. But if we take a moment to look back through our own educations, we can undoubtedly identify those small moments with our teachers that made all the difference.

More information on TRI can be found on the Targeted Reading Intervention website.

Researcher bio

Over the last thirty years, Dr. Lynne Vernon-Feagans has focused her interest on children at risk — especially African-American children who live in poverty. As part of the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project, she led a study on children’s use of language in their home neighborhood and in their classrooms at school. The book she authored as a result helped educators and practitioners understand the disconnect between the children’s neighborhood language and culture and the school’s language and culture to help better understand the challenges faced by minority children during the transition to school.

A full biography can be found on the School of Education website.

Ever think of using video games in your teaching? It might seem a bit odd, or even outlandish, but recent studies have shown that using video games as a learning tool can promote higher-order thinking, increase the positivity of a learning environment, and decrease achievement gaps. Dr. Janice Anderson, assistant professor of science education at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education, has been researching educational video games — Quest Atlantis, a 3D multi-player game, and Supercharged!, a 3D simulation game — as a resource to develop content knowledge for the past several years. Her research findings clearly suggest that video games increase students’ understanding and engagement with curricular content.

Dr. Anderson’s research

In Quest Atlantis players engage in a wide variety of quests, or adventures, that are focused on a variety of learning standards. Dr. Anderson researched the use of this game platform to support the instruction of water quality and ecosystems in three fifth-grade classrooms. Students in these classrooms engaged in a quest to identify some potential causes for a decrease of the fish population in a Quest Atlantis world. To do this the students had to interview game characters, take water samples, and analyze data in order to formulate a hypothesis about the fish population change. The students engaged in game play during 15-20 class periods lasting 45-60 minutes each. A comparison of pre-test and post-test scores as well as various forms of qualitative data showed significant learning gains. The game provided these students a context to engage and apply the content they were learning in the class.

In Supercharged! players propel and navigate a spacecraft by controlling its electric charge. Dr. Anderson researched the use of this game in teaching electrostatics in an undergraduate physical science lab for pre-service elementary teachers. In this research Dr. Anderson studied a total of six laboratory classes: three that used Supercharged! as a learning tool and three that used more traditional laboratory experiments and observations. There were a total of two lab periods, of two hours apiece, devoted to electrostatics.

As with the fifth-graders, the pre-service teachers who engaged in learning with the video game showed greater gains from their pre-test to post-test scores than the students who had a more traditional lab experience. Additionally, the students who played Supercharged! demonstrated a greater qualitative understanding of electrostatics than the students who did not have the opportunity to engage in the video game. Interestingly, however, when asked how much they had learned, the students who played Supercharged! rated their learning lower than the students in the traditional lab. Even though these students did demonstrate greater learning gains, they may not have seen the video game as a learning experience.

In Dr. Anderson’s studies, the students’ content learning was enhanced by the use of immersive video game environments. The students who used the video games as a learning tool showed a statistically significant increase from pre-test to post-test scores. In addition, the students’ conversational and conceptual understanding of the topics was enhanced by the use of the video games. Dr. Anderson’s research clearly suggests that video games can lead to higher learning outcomes.

Tips from Dr. Anderson

Video games work best as learning tools when they are coupled with inquiry-based, hands-on experiences.

Dr. Anderson’s use of these games was coupled with inquiry-based learning. The games create a context for the content to be engaged. It is the content instruction that the games are embedded in that give them meaning. The games are just one piece of the learning experience. It is important not to think of video games as a primary mode of instruction; they are instead a potentially powerful learning tool.

Don’t base what your students can do with video games on your own experiences with video games.

When many educators think about video games, they may think about early video game systems, such as Atari or the first generation Nintendo. The early video games, such as Pong or Mario Bros, were more skill-based, while more modern games rely more on critical thinking. Modern educational games can give students a type of hands-on experience that games of the past did not. Additionally, they can play a critical role in engaging students in classroom content.

So what?

Video games are in no way the magic bullet for teaching 21st-century students, but the research has shown that they can be a powerful teaching tool. There are more educational video games being developed every day, so don’t be afraid to play.

Web resources

Videos

“A Vision of K-12 Students Today“

Students today are unlike any previous generation. It is imperative that educators understand the uses and motivational potential of technology in the classroom. This Youtube video was created to inspire educators to think about how they might be able to harness technologies in their own practice.

General information

Wired blog posts

Archived posts on education from Wired’s video game blog.

Scholarly articles on digital games

From Digiplay Initiative, the blog of prominent video game researcher Jason Rutter.

Organizations

The Education Arcade

The Education Arcade’s mission is to promote learning through game play by demonstrating the social, cultural, and educational potentials of video games and by initiating new game development projects, coordinating research efforts, and informing public conversations about the uses of video games in the educational setting.

Learning Games Network

The Learning Games Network is a network of scholars, teachers, producers, and game designers focused on the development and distribution of new games centered on learning sciences across content areas.

Digital Game Research Association (DiGRA)

DiGRA is dedicated to advancing the study of digital games fostering the development of research practices and standards in the field.

A few popular educational games

Immune Attack

Immune Attach is a 3D game where players navigate through blood vessels and connective tissue to retrain the immune cells of an ill patient. In the game, players learn about the biological process of the human body to detect and fight infections.

Quest Atlantis

Quest Atlantis is a 3D multi-user gaming environment that focuses on a wide variety of curricular standards. Each quest within the game is focused on a different standard. Quest Atlantis has partnered with North Carolina to develop quests that are specifically tied to North Carolina curriculum standards.

SURGE

SURGE is a 2D game where players navigate a spaceship and apply physics principles to achieve an objective.

Researcher bio

Dr. Janice L. Anderson teaches elementary education science courses in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Dr. Anderson’s research interests include the use of educational games to teach science content, the impact of gender and race on students’ construction of scientific knowledge, supporting students in scientific inquiry, explanation and argumentation and the design and enactment of science curriculum materials.

A full biography can be found on the School of Education website.