PRISMS: Pupils' Reflections on Instruction in School Math and Science

PRISMS has two research components:

•To describe the development of scientific literacy in students who are English language learners receiving special education for learning disabilities

• To describe the lesson structures used by teachers in developing scientific literacy with students who are English language learners with learning disabilities.

Four bilingual students with learning disabilities and four bilingual students with no identified disabilities with similar levels of language proficiencies will be randomly selected from two participating classrooms. Students will be interviewed in two parts: (1) to explore students' attitudes and beliefs about how they are learning science, and (2) to explore how they describe what they have done, and explain why an activity works as it does.

Their teachers will be videotaped in total class sessions at the beginning of the unit, in the middle, and at the end (3 samples) to examine teacher-student interaction. They will participate in ethnographic style interviews at the beginning and end of the unit to explore how they perceive the way they teach science. The teachers will take notes on what decisions they made before, during, and after teaching a lesson, and will keep a reflective journal. Data analysis will involve three components: (1) discourse analysis of student language production; (2) discourse analysis of student-teacher discourse patterns in lessons; and (3) ethnographic content analysis of student and teacher interviews. All interviews and videotaped observations will be transcribed verbatim. CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis Program) will be used to analyze syntactic structures.