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Educator Perceptions of Instructional Strategies for Standards-based Education of English Language Learners with Disabilities

ELLs with Disabilities Report 7

Published by the National Center on Educational Outcomes

Prepared by:
Martha Thurlow • Deb Albus • Vitaliy Shyyan • Kristin Liu • Manuel Barrera

August 2004

Any or all portions of this document may be reproduced and distributed without prior permission, provided the source is cited as:

Thurlow, M., Albus, D., Shyyan, V., Liu, K., & Barrera, M. (2004). Educator perceptions of instructional strategies for standards-based education of English language learners with disabilities (ELLs with Disabilities Report 7). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, National Center on Educational Outcomes. Retrieved [today's date], from the World Wide Web: http://education.umn.edu/NCEO/OnlinePubs/ELLsDisReport7.html

Overview

Since the 1994 reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, there has been focused attention on students with disabilities and English language learners in state assessment and accountability systems. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB; Public Law 107-110) has added emphasis and clarity to this attention; Federal special education law and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; Public Law 105-117) also confirmed that students with disabilities are to participate in state and district-wide assessment systems. Although students with disabilities and English language learners have increasingly become the focus of educational improvement efforts within standards-based reform, there is perhaps an even greater need for attention to students at the cross-section of these two student populations – English language learners with disabilities.

A nationally-representative descriptive study of schools in 2001-2002 estimated that the number of students with limited English skills1 as well as disabilities was approximately 357,325 (Zehler, Fleischman, Hopstock, Pendzick, & Stephenson, 2003). This statistic indicates the estimated percentage of these students to be around 9.2 percent of all students with limited English proficiency, with the understanding that there may be under-representation of students identified as having disabilities. Official counts of English language learners with disabilities have been uncertain, in part, because guidelines for the identification of these students are still being developed. Further, the amount of time given to allow accurate identification and placement can span several years because educators want to ensure that potential problems that these students may be facing are not due to language acquisition issues alone.

Regardless of whether we know the exact number of English language learners with disabilities across the nation, or in individual states, this group of students is clearly an important subgroup deserving attention in the context of standards-based educational systems. In the state of Minnesota, for example, the population of English language learners is primarily Spanish-speaking students, Hmong students, Vietnamese students, and Somali students. These populations are not those typical of other states, such as California and Texas, which have had primarily high numbers of students from primarily Spanish language backgrounds.

The education of English language learners in Minnesota does not reflect a lengthy history of bilingual programming, which is more likely to be the case in other states. Minnesota offers a variety of programming models for both English as a Second Language (ESL) and Bilingual Education (BE) approaches. Various models of these approaches, which include intensive, pull-out, and sheltered, are chosen to suit specific districts’ needs with respect to the homogeneity of the population of English language learners, staffing resources, and district goals (Minnesota Department of Children Families and Learning, 2002).

The population of students in Minnesota and the service approaches that have been used with English language learners and with students with disabilities all have taken place within a changing context of standards-based education. Minnesota has had grade-level standards in reading, mathematics, and science, as well as in other content areas. As in many states, the content standards are revisited frequently. However, there has been a commitment to rigorous content standards and standards-based education in the state of Minnesota. This is an important context within which to examine the nature of instructional recommendations for English language learners with disabilities.

Providing educational programs for English language learners with disabilities is a growing need in states across the nation as the number of these students increases. Educators who work with these students are a viable source of information about appropriate instructional strategies for this population of students. Current understanding of strategies for educating English language learners with disabilities is based on these students’ need for access to grade-level curriculum by providing instruction that takes into account the demands of language learning and cognitive processing load (Gersten, Baker, & Marks, 1998). It is important to check this current understanding against the knowledge of practicing teachers.

The study reported here was conducted as part of a larger investigation designed to identify instructional strategies most beneficial for English language learners with disabilities. Other aspects of the investigation are examining the research literature, information from parents and students, and the effects of specific strategies. In this study, our goal was to determine which instructional strategies are recommended for English language learners with disabilities by teachers across disciplines (special education, ESL/bilingual education, mainstream content areas). Specifically, we wanted to determine the teacher-identified effective strategies for teaching grade-level reading/English language arts, mathematics, and science content to English language learners with disabilities.

To accomplish the goals of the study, we invited teachers to participate in group sessions using a specific process to evaluate, brainstorm, and weight the importance of the strategies they thought were most effective for teaching each of the skill areas to English language learners with disabilities. Because of the varied backgrounds of the teachers, a methodology was used that would enable them to generate ideas about instruction and evaluate them in a neutral and objective manner. A process that had been used previously by the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) referred to as the Multi-Attribute Consensus Building Process (MACB) was selected because it seemed to have been useful in bringing diverse perspectives together (Vanderwood, Ysseldyke, & Thurlow, 1993; Vanderwood & Erickson, 1994). A slightly adjusted form of this process was used.

^{1 Note: We recognize that English language learner (ELL) is used elsewhere as an equivalent term for limited English proficient (LEP) students which focuses more positively on student learning.}

Method

This study was conducted in two stages. The purpose of the first stage was primarily to develop the instrument for use in the second stage, with a larger number of teachers. In the following sections, each stage is described with concern to the invited participants, and activities completed toward instrument development and ultimately the collection of study data.

Stage I

Invited Participants
School districts within the state of Minnesota were targeted for inclusion in the study. The goal was to include those with sufficient numbers of students with both limited English proficiency and disabilities. After developing this list of districts based on state testing information, NCEO staff members sought a balance of participants with two thirds from urban districts and one third from suburban and rural districts. Due to mobility of students after the time of testing and small numbers of teachers or coordinators in areas initially chosen for participation, staff had to select additional locations.

In Stage I, 30 teachers participated from a total of five schools in five districts (two urban, three suburban). Stage 1 teachers were primarily general education teachers. Most teachers had more than 10 years experience and had been in their current job from 1 to 5 years. Details of these participants’ professional experience and the language groups of students taught by them are found in Appendix A.

Teachers, coordinators, and other educators were invited to participate in the Multi-Attribute Consensus Building (MACB) sessions based on certain criteria. They had to at least have experience teaching or assisting through related services students with limited English proficiency or special education students in grades 6-9. In a few cases, teachers who had taught 5th grade students were included. Participants were recruited from ESL/bilingual, mainstream content, and special education areas, with most special education teachers working with students who had high incidence disabilities (e.g., learning disabilities, speech–language impairments). For optimum interaction in the MACB sessions, small groups of 4-7 teachers were formed. One group had only three participants due to an illness.

Instrument Development Activities

The purpose of the Stage I was primarily to develop the instrument. These steps included drafting the initial instrument, standardizing the definition of instructional strategy, and conducting the MACB process with teachers to generate, weight, and finally rate the strategies as to their feasibility and use.

Drafting Initial Instrument

Staff researched the literature for strategies to include in a core list for each content area on the initial instrument. Staff then selected approximately five recommended instructional strategies from the Gersten, Baker, and Marks’ (1998)) article as a starting point for teachers to use in discussing and generating additional strategies they would recommend for use with limited English proficient students with disabilities in content area classrooms. This initial list is provided in Table 1.

Table 1. Initial Core List of Strategies by Content Area

Strategy Definitions

In addition to the initial core list of strategies, teachers were presented with the following definition of a teaching strategy to help them in their selection and contribution of strategies to the initial lists:

The teaching strategy is a purposeful activity to engage learners in acquiring new behaviors or knowledge. To be useful for our purposes, an instructional strategy should have clearly defined steps or a clear description of what the teacher does.

An initial glossary that included descriptions of the selected core strategies was provided to participants during the MACB process.

MACB Process

During the MACB process, after discussing practice weighting examples (see Appendix B) participants were asked to weight the importance of the three content areas: Reading, Math, and Science. Then teachers contributed strategies to the initial lists for each of the three content areas. As this occurred, notes about these new strategies were taken for potential inclusion in a final glossary. Participants’ comments during this process were recorded on a paper easel, or noted by individuals on study notepads provided in their folders for our information later. Following the generation of additional strategies, participants were asked to weight all of the strategies, both core and generated, for each content area.

Participants were given time to weight specific strategies, with the help of the glossary to define the strategies, and then they were asked to voice their numerical weighting of each strategy, in turn, for data entry. After data entry, these weightings were projected onto a screen with the overall average for the group calculated at the end of each strategy row. These weighting results then provided the focus of a discussion guided by a facilitator, on why very high or very low weights were given to a specific strategy. Those participants giving the high or low weights were asked to describe why they gave the weight they did. All sessions were taped and analyzed to provide further insight into the rationale of why participants weighted specific strategies. Participants were allowed to change their individual weightings after discussion, although both pre- and post-discussion weightings were saved as separate documents on the computer.

Figure 1 shows the scale that was used by teachers in weighting strategies and the specific instructions they were given. For the weighting, participants were instructed that they had to weight at least one strategy as 100, but could also weight more than one as 100.

Figure 1. Weighting Scale

Shown on a continuum, the weighting scale looks like this:

0                           20                             40                              60                         80                   100

Feasibility and Use Surveys

After the MACB process of weighting and discussing strategies, participants were asked to complete an additional survey. It asked participants to weight the feasibility of the strategies and asked them to rate how often they used each of them.

Stage II

In Stage II, the focus shifted away from instrument development to collection of data for the final study. This section describes the participants in Stage II, including their professional background, types of students served, reported teaching approaches, and languages of students served. This is followed by a brief note concerning final data collection activities.

Invited Participants

The regional representation of districts and schools in the study was predominantly suburban. Two urban districts participated with a total of 3 schools (14 educators), and 5 suburban districts participated with 5 schools (28 educators). This second stage lacked the additional perspective of participants from "greater Minnesota" areas.

Staff used the same criteria for inviting participants to participate in Stage II as in Stage I. Information about these teachers’ professional experience, includes data on teacher type, subjects taught, years of experience, types of students served, teaching approaches, and the language groups of students served are provided in the following tables.

Professional Experience

Of the 42 teachers using the final list, 40.5% (N=17) were ESL/bilingual teachers, 23.8% (N=10) were Special Education teachers, and 35.7% (N=15) were from other educational areas (see Figure 2).

                                    Grade and Teacher Type

Table 2 presents information provided by the educators about what subject areas they taught. Combining the numbers of educators that reported teaching one or multiple subjects, about half of the total (22) taught reading, 9 taught mathematics, and 5 taught science. Five educators had marked other content areas that they currently taught, and six did not provide information for the question.


 

Table 2. Subject Areas Taught

Figure 3 shows a graph of these teachers’ years of professional experience. Of the 42 teachers, 50% had over 10 years of professional experience, 29% had 5-10 years of experience, and 19% had 1-5 years experience. Only 2.4% of the participants had a year or less of teaching experience.

Another characteristic that was recorded by the study demographic survey was the types of students that the educators served. The majority of educators reported working with English language learners with disabilities (N=32). The second largest group served was English language learners (N=30), followed by general education students (N=25) and students with disabilities (N=25) in equal numbers (see Figure 4).

Participants were asked to answer several questions on teaching practices. Their responses are shown in Figure 5. Almost three-fourths of the participants (73.8%) reported that they taught alone. Only one quarter (27.5%) of the participants reported that they taught in teams. About 40% of all teachers (37.5%) stated that they taught extended content standards (e.g., breaking down a standard into smaller pieces or adapting it downward so that students with more severe learning issues can be working on them) for students with IEPs, and 42.5% of teachers said that they did not incorporate this practice. Half of the participants taught skills directly related to the completion of high standards in content being implemented in another teacher’s class. The question of teaching language found in a specific high standard being implemented in another teacher’s class was answered thus: 41.5% of the total practiced this approach and 51.2% did not practice it. Nearly 30% (29.3%) of all participants acted as a resource for general education teachers who were implementing high standards-based work that includes English language learners; 41.5% of teachers acted as a resource for general education teachers who were implementing high standards-based work that includes students with disabilities.

Figure 5 Teaching Approaches

A – Teaching alone
B – Team teaching
C – Teaching extended content standards for IEP students
D – Teaching skills in another teacher’s class
E – Teaching language in another teacher’s class
F – Resource for teachers who teach ESL  students
G – Resource for teachers who teach IEP students

Figure 6 shows the number of educators who reported working with students in each language group. The “Other” category included less frequent languages reported by educators. Among these were Vietnamese, Russian, Ethiopian, and Sudanese.

Data Collection Activities

In Stage II, activities shifted away from instrument development towards final data collection. The results of the Stage I instrument development process produced a final study instrument with a list of 28 reading strategies, 20 mathematics strategies, and 23 science strategies. These strategies, used with Stage II teachers, are listed in Appendix B.

In this second stage, 42 educators followed the same MACB process of weighting and discussing strategies and filling out the feasibility and use surveys as in Stage I, except that these educators were working with the final strategy list. No additional strategies were generated in Stage II. If educators had comments about strategies not listed, they were invited to note these on the paper provided in the study packets.

Results

The results reported in this section are only from data gathered during Stage II. Results of weightings are reported in the order in which educators encountered the questions during the MACB sessions, starting with weighting the importance of the content areas, then strategies under each content area, use and feasibility of each strategy, strategy weightings by teacher type, and finally a section on educators’ rationales for how they weighted strategies during the sessions.

Content Area Importance

The study results indicated that the content areas of reading and mathematics were weighted as “very important.” The Reading content area was consistently weighted the most important by educators with an average of 100 (SD = .00). The mathematics weighting was slightly lower – 90.7 (SD = 8.06), and the Science weighting was the lowest – 78.8 (SD = 11.21), which is positioned in the “important” area on the weighting scale.

Strategy Importance

Although the goal during Stage I was to generate strategies, there often seemed to be disagreement over what constituted a strategy. This occurred even though the teachers were presented with a definition for use as described in the Methods section. As a result, the generated "strategies" that later became part of the instrument did not always meet the specifics of the "strategies" definition. This occurred despite repetition of the definition during MACB sessions and reminders to check that the recommended strategy was actually a strategy according to the definition. See the final glossary of strategy definitions in Appendix C.

The weighting results for the top five strategies for each content area are presented first, with a further breakdown of specifics by content area. As shown in Table 3, the reading strategies include direct teaching of vocabulary, teaching strategies, fluency building, chunking and questioning, and relating reading to student experience. For math the top five includes tactile concrete experiences, daily re-looping of material, problem solving instruction and task analysis strategies, and teacher and student "think alouds." Science has similar strategy foci in using visuals, pre-reading strategies, teacher modeling, and letting students experience active "hands-on" participation in class.
 

Table 3. Importance of Strategies 

Using pictures to demonstrate steps

Modeling/teacher demonstration

Reading Strategies

Twenty-eight reading strategies, as perceived by teachers, ultimately were weighted by study participants. Of those 28, the following were considered most important: direct teaching of vocabulary through listening, seeing, reading, and writing in short time segments; teaching pre-, during, and post-reading strategies; fluency building (high frequency words); chunking and questioning aloud (reading mastery); and relating reading to student experiences (see Table 4). Appendix D presents the entire list of strategies for reading as well as their minimum and maximum weightings, their average weightings, and the standard deviation for each strategy.

Table 4. Top Five Reading Strategies

Mathematics Strategies

Of the 20 “strategies” weighted for mathematics, the top five are listed in Table 5. These strategies include the following: tactile, concrete experiences of mathematics; daily re-looping of previously learned material; problem solving instruction and task analysis strategies; teacher “think-alouds”; and student “think-alouds.” Appendix D presents the complete list of strategies for mathematics as well as minimum and maximum weightings, their average weightings, and the standard deviation for each strategy.
 

Table 5. Top Five Mathematics Strategies

Science Strategies

Twenty-three “strategies” were weighted for science. In Table 6, the top weighted strategies in the area of science were: hands-on, active participation; using visuals; using pictures to demonstrate steps; using pre-reading strategies in content areas; and modeling/teacher demonstration. Appendix D presents the total list of strategies for science as well as minimum and maximum weightings, their average weightings, and the standard deviation for each strategy.

Table 6. Top Five Science Strategies

97.59

4.14

Using pictures to demonstrate steps

93.89

8.45

Modeling/teacher demonstration

Well-known Strategies

In addition to analyzing the strategies given the highest weights by participants, we also examined how strategies that were identified in the research literature had been weighted. We had selected four to five core instructional strategies from the literature for each content area at the beginning of Stage I. When the weightings for these strategies were compared to those weighted the most important by teachers, there was very little overlap between them (e.g., think-alouds) (see Table 7). For reading, only direct teaching of vocabulary was in both the initial core strategy list and the top five strategies as weighted by teachers. For math, teacher think-alouds were on both lists. Science had no common strategies across the two lists. Even so, many of these strategies were still rated as “important” and “very important” according to the weighting scale.

Table 7. Weighting of Strategies from Research Literature Compared to Top Five by Teachers
 

97.59

4.14

Using pictures to demonstrate steps

93.89

8.45

Modeling/teacher demonstration

Among the strategies in the initial core (Table 7), Curriculum Based Probe had the highest standard deviation across all content areas, ranging from 26.30 to 30.12. In Figure 7, the weighting means for this strategy are presented by three teacher types: ESL/Bilingual, Special Education, and Other. It shows a gap between ESL/Bilingual teachers and Special Education teachers for reading and mathematics, with a less obvious difference for the science content area. The teachers’ weightings for science therefore had more variation (30.12 in table 7), but did not display the same tendencies towards gaps in overall means by teacher type.